Animal QC : My Preposterous Life - Hardcover

Gary Bell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906308640 ISBN 13: 9781906308643

Publisher: Monday Books, 2015

Synopsis

GARY BELL QC appears to be a pillar of the Establishment - one of Britain's leading lawyers, with his own BBC TV show, an entry in Who's Who, and a wife whose family are listed in Burke's Landed Gentry.

But beneath the horsehair wig and silk gown is a very unusual barrister indeed - and his life story is astonishing and hilarious.

Born to a teenaged cigarette factory worker and a nineteen-year-old miner, he grew up in a condemned slum terrace and then a Nottinghamshire pit village, and left his tough comprehensive without taking any exams.

He followed his father down the mine but promptly quit because of his lifelong fear of the dark, and spent the next decade either homeless or working in a strange variety of jobs.

Asda shelf-stacker, Pork Farms pie maker, door-to-door rag salesman, fruit machine technician, fireman, lawnmower mechanic, bricklayer, pet food warehouse fork lift truck driver… he's done the lot (and was sacked from most of them for incompetence).

Along the way, he managed to rack up a conviction for fraud - he worked out how to fiddle those fruit machines - and was also a notorious football hooligan known as 'Animal' (though not for his fighting prowess, he's a terrible coward).

Finally pulling himself together in his mid-twenties, he went to university as a mature student, where he stuck out from his younger, public school-educated contemporaries with his stonewashed jeans, skinhead and moustache. So he 'decided to become upper-middle class', adopting tweeds, received pronunciation, and (strictly for his own amusement) an Old Etonian back story. He got so good at this that he went back to his 'old school' to play in Old Boys' Field Game fixtures, and many actual OEs still swear they were at Eton with him.

There's much more to say about Gary Bell - international debating champion, award-winning stand-up comic, Beverly Hills lawyer (he was recruited whilst still a student), chronic bedwetter, private pilot, friend of The Village People, devoted dad - but there isn't the space.

Now among the country's top defence barristers - his cases are so complex that the papers are not counted but weighed, and they often weigh ten or fifteen tonnes - his preposterous story reads like a strange dream and redefines the word 'amazing', as well as being extremely funny, very moving, and utterly life-affirming.

About this title

Review

"An extraordinary yarn, a great autobiography... Marvel Comics could take Gary Bell on." --Libby Purves, BBC Radio Four Midweek

"Unvarnished candour... riotous... Benign, witty and effortlessly charming, Gary Bell certainly seems a far cry from the animal of the title." -- Angela Epstein, Daily Telegraph

"You might expect a QC's autobiography to limber up with a few droll tales from prep and public school before moving on to dewy-eyed memories of golden summers at Oxford. Well, not this one." --Daily Mail

"A really good yarn" -- Naga Munchetty, BBC Breakfast

"A legal champion for the underdog" -- Bill Turnbull, BBC Breakfast

"Fascinating" -- Dan Walker, BBC Radio 5 Live Afternoon Edition

"Enthralling... funny... inspirational... Local boy made good? That doesn't quite cover the life story of Gary Bell, bad local boy made very, very good. Just as he has a gift for the spoken word when pleading a case in court, he is handy with the written word too. Rags-to-riches memoirs can leave you begging to punch the author but here the enormity of the gap between his wretched beginnings in Radford and St Ann's and his life as a lawyer are handled with good humour and an eye for a telling phrase." -- Jeremy Lewis, Nottingham Evening Post

"Hugely entertaining, [a] remarkable, heartwarming and inspiring story." --Mail on Sunday

Edition details

• Publisher: Monday Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1906308640
• ISBN 13: 9781906308643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 332