One of those books I have no idea where I got it from, they seem to just find themselves on my shelves without me doing anything. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

So much I want to say about this book. I want to talk about the movie and how it’s inspirational to so many people, not just men. I want to talk about how this particular edition is simplified so adults have something simple to help them learn to read English. I want to talk about my relationship with the movie and the book.

The movie with Robert Carlyle. You’ve probably seen him in something. Carlyle was in Hamish Macbeth as the lead and also as the villain in one of the James Bond movies. You might have seen him in SGU: Stargate Universe or possibly Trainspotting or a legion of other roles. If he’s not big yet, he will be. This is a brilliant movie. It shows life in Sheffield in all its grittiness with all the problems arising from the closure of the largest employer in town. It also shows how taking some sort of action can change your outlook and change your life. The scene when they’re trying to collect their dole money and Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff comes over the PA system illustrates this perfectly, it’s something they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a few weeks prior.

It’s spun off a range of things including many videos on Youtube showing men doing the full monty as depicted in the movie. Society leads us to believe the human body is a terrible thing and needs covering up this kind of action while empowering, can get you arrested in certain places.

The edition in the photo is a Penguin Reader’s edition for people trying to learn our mongrel language as a second language or even if you’re learning to read as an adult for the first time. You don’t want children’s books, that’ll bore you to tears, you want books with grit, books with story, books with something to keep you interested. This will do all of that, and I hope it will then spur you onto find the original and read that. It’s a film tie-in written by Wendy Holden.

My relationship with the movie is rather complicated. It started off with Robert Carlyle being an excellent actor, I watched him in every episode of Hamish Macbeth. I’m not saying anything about seeing men taking their clothes off as being accused of sexism once in a year is once too often. Then there’s the story of how it changes these men. As you’ll notice from the photo I have the VHS of the movie. It’s taken me rather longer than it should have to write these 500 words as I kept getting distracted by my searches on Youtube for The Full Monty. Maybe I should have just put on the movie and watched the whole thing, it would have taken just as long.