This Is Your Life

Praise for
This Is Your Life:

“A splendid satire on our celebrity hungry age. The only problem is that O'Farrell has written such funny dialogue for Jimmy that it is hard to believe that he could be anything but our finest stand-up comic.”

—
The Times
(London)

“The conclusion is ingeniously done. All credit to O'Farrell's resourcefulness and his relish of the comic twist and detour.”

—
The Guardian

“O'Farrell is an experienced TV comedy writer and columnist and it shows. . . .
This Is Your Life
will be a huge hit.”

—
Time Out London

“Very funny—this engaging farce is peppered with O'Farrell's observations on personal fulfillment and the media.”

—
Heat Magazine

“John O'Farrell's very funny novel is the story of an underachiever who invents his own celebrity résumé and finds that the ever hungry media cheerfully swallow it. The only problem with the novel is that it's too close to the truth to count as satire!”

—
The Observer
(London)

Praise for John O'Farrell:

“John O'Farrell has a tart narrative voice and a delectably understated way with wisecracks . . . very, very funny.”

—Janet Maslin,
The New York Times Book Review for The Best a Man Can Get

this is your life

Also by John O'Farrell

Global Village Idiot

a novel

JOHN O'FARRELL

Copyright © 2002 by John O'Farrell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Doubleday,
a division of Transworld Publishers, London

Printed in the United States of America

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

O'Farrell, John.
        This is your life : a novel / John O'Farrell.
            p. cm.
        eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9940-9
        1. Comedians—Fiction. 2. Celebrities—Fiction. 3. Impostors and
    imposture—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I. Title.
    PR6065.F34T48 2004
    823′.914—dc22                                                               2003064148

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

For Pat O'Farrell

this is your life

SCRIPT FOR THIS IS YOUR LIFE – JIMMY CONWAY

UNAWARE OF THE SURPRISE AWAITING HIM, JIMMY APPROACHES THE ENTRANCE TO THE RESCUED OTTER SANCTUARY. ONLOOKERS APPLAUD. BUT THEN A FAMOUS TELEVISION PRESENTER (STILL EAMONN ANDREWS??) APPROACHES CLUTCHING A BIG RED BOOK.

I folded the well-worn script and placed it carefully back in my breast pocket. It was over twenty years since I had painstakingly typed it out on the Silver Reed typewriter I had received for my thirteenth birthday.

I lay back on the tatty sofa and closed my eyes. I wanted to empty my head of all thoughts but somewhere an insect was buzzing loudly. At the window a wasp seemed to be struggling with the insect equivalent of Fermat's last theorem. Problem: you are confronted with a half-opened window. How do you get to the other side? Wasp answer: keep head-butting the glass over and over again. ‘Aah,' says the wasp professor, ‘you would think so, wouldn't you? But if you repeatedly fly into the glass of the
half-opened
window and you find for some reason that you cannot seem to go straight through the glass, then what do you do?' Hush falls over the wasp tutorial as their eager brains are taxed to the limit of wasp logic. Until one brilliant young wasp, the intellectual superstar of Wasp College, Cambridge, tentatively puts up his front leg, the answer slowly coming together in his insect head.

‘If . . . one . . . cannot fly straight
through
the glass' – he cogitates as the lecture room falls silent, the other wasps sensing that they are in the presence of wasp genius – ‘and we have established that the window is
half open
. . .' he continues, his brow furrowed in total concentration, ‘then surely the logical thing to do . . . would be .. . to fly repeatedly at the glass, buzzing a lot?'

The other pupils glance eagerly across at the professor to see if this pupil has hit upon the solution, but their tutor smiles knowingly and shakes his head. ‘No,' he says. ‘The answer is that there is no solution to this conundrum. It is an impossible problem, like predicting prime numbers or putting
a definitive value on pi. It is a philosophical trick question that cannot be answered.'

I stood up and rolled up a newspaper to strike the stupid wasp dead, but then thought better of it and used my improvised swatter to guide him gently over the top of the window and away into the outside world. A year earlier I don't think I would have spared him but now I felt in a position to act with generosity and benevolence.

I lay back on the sofa once more and closed my eyes. How nice it would be if I could just go to sleep now, if I could forget where I was and what I had to go and do. Then, as if somebody was aware of my escapist fantasy, there was a loud distorted crackle, and from the old speaker hanging off the wall came the startling message: ‘Jimmy Con way, this is your five-minute call! Jimmy Conway to the stage please.'

In 300 seconds' time I was supposed to be walking out onto the stage of one of London's most famous theatres in front of two thousand specially invited guests. Here, I was to stand on my own under the glare of the lights and perform a brand new stand-up comedy routine, a performance which was, incidentally, being transmitted live on BBC1 to millions of homes across the country, who even now were glued to the spectacle of an all-night charity gala featuring dozens of their favourite stars.