A Play On Words - Hardcover

Longden, Deric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593044029 ISBN 13: 9780593044025

Publisher: Bantam Press, 1999

Synopsis

Further episodes in the life of Deric Longden and the Longden household. At least two new characters join the feline cast led by the ever-popular Thermal. The thread running through the book is the interesting experience of watching Lost for Words turn into a television drama, but attached to the thread are the usual wonderful collection of Longden observations of life at home and (not too far) abroad. As usual work suffers constant interruptions from Thermal & Co, but somehow the research gets done. Did you know that Huddersfield has the country's biggest per capita consumption of crinkle-cut chips? And why does two-thirds of all the Benedictine produced get drunk in Bradford?

About this title

About the Author

Deric Longden was born in Chesterfield in 1936 and married Diana Hill in 1957. After various jobs he took over a small factory making women's lingerie, but began writing and broadcasting in the 1970s. The demands made on him by Diana's illness, subsequently believed to be a form of ME, forced him to sell the factory, and since then he has devoted himself to full-time writing, broadcasting, lecturing and after-dinner speaking. Diana's Story, published in 1989, some years after Diana's death, was a bestseller. It was followed by Lost for Words, The Cat Who Came in from the Cold, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Enough to Make a Cat Laugh and A Play On Words. Deric Longden's first two books were adapted for television under the title Wide-Eyed and Legless, and an adaptation of Lost for Words was screened in January 1999, attracting an audience of more than 12 million viewers and winning the Emmy for best foreign drama. He married the writer Aileen Armitage in 1990 and now lives in Huddersfield.

From the Back Cover

Ever since Dame Thora Hird breathed life into the role of Deric Longden's mother in Wide-Eyed and Legless, she had been on at him to write a play based on the sequel, Lost for Words.

'And don't hang about. I'm eighty-three, you know.'

But life doesn't run in straight lines for Deric. Apart from his duties as official guide dog to his blind wife, the writer Aileen Armitage, he is at the beck and call of three and a half cats, a somewhat bemused vole and a tap-dancing squirrel. He also had a book to finish, so the screenplay had to take a back seat for the time being.

But Dame Thora didn't give up. She rang him regularly. 'Come on, lad, get a move on. I'm eighty-five, you know.'

By the time she was eighty-six Deric had finished the script. In January 1999 Lost for Words was finally televised - by which time Dame Thora was eighty-seven going on thirty-two.

In A Play on Words he describes the unique experience of seeing at close hand his book - and an important part of his own life - turn into a film amid the continuing chaos of his private world. Somehow or other, despite the usual hilarious interruptions, his own brand of literary work gets done, influenced by such matters as rag-and-bone men, the Moscow State Circus and crinkle-cut beetroot - and the usual cast of characters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593044029
• ISBN 13: 9780593044025
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256