How Did All This Happen?. John Bishop

bus triumphant. Every single player (apart from Lawrence, who played in goal and whose cousin attended that college and to whom he’d had to talk all night) had got at least a snog. It was a fantastic feeling to be amongst a body of men who had arrived in new lands and challenged the local men to do battle on the football pitch, emerging victorious and then finding pleasure among the local women. It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a Viking.

      Despite the fun I was having in Newcastle, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the course. In truth, my experience in literature has been limited to books that I was forced to read for school rather than books I wanted to read; it was only during my A-level course that I had begun to read books for pleasure. Prior to that, if it was not a comic book or a Roy of the Rovers annual, I never read anything.

      I regret those wasted years, and I am pleased that my three sons are avid readers. I still don’t read as much as I would like, but I attempt to have at least one book always on the go. This does also lead to the accumulation of a mass of books that I have started on a train journey somewhere and never finished. I used to feel guilty about not finishing books but, as I’ve become older, I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fault – if the book was any good, I would have finished it.

      This could be a very pragmatic way to explain my laziness, or it could simply be true. Books are the only thing that you embark upon feeling responsible for your own enjoyment of it; even if the first 50 pages are rubbish, there is a sense of defeat if you don’t finish it. That doesn’t happen in any other art form; it certainly doesn’t happen in comedy. You can’t be rubbish for 20 minutes to the extent that the audience get up and leave without seeing the conclusion of your act, and feel totally reassured that on their way home they will think it’s their fault.