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I’m a few years younger than Josh and I didn’t watch as much TV as he did (it sounds like no one watched as much TV as he did) but I remembered most of the shows and other content. Do yourself a favour and give this book a swerve, and maybe pick up a copy of ‘When Saturday Comes’ magazine instead. It’s likely his childhood like a lot of us was pretty unmemorable but I would have liked to have known more and also more about his climb to comedy. Together it tells the story of the end of an era, the last time when watching television was a shared experience for the family and the nation, before the internet meant everyone watched different things at different times on different devices, headphones on to make absolutely sure no one could watch it with them.
I also found the book to have been quite thrown together; lots of juggled writing (lots of mentions of things before their chapter - e. and sometimes this means I have to sit on the loo for ages (although let’s face it, sometimes I sit there just to read more of my book! We don't often get a chance to talk about the impacts of television (apart from news articles about the 'dangers'), so this was a refreshing read - a television equivalent of Acaster's "Perfect Sound Whatever". including Blobbyland, which takes far more of a prominent position in my childhood than you'd think). Like Lou I have bowel problems – not the same one, but still ‘anal wouldn’t help’ (this is a reference from the book – not me being completely weird when writing this blog post!I respect the fact that is the main focus but if you start the book talking about growing up and how shows effected you growing up and sort of autobiographical it should continue like that and not sore of fizzle out. Using a different television show of the time as it’s starting point for each chapter Watching Neighbours Twice a Day… is part-childhood memoir, part-comic history of 90s television and culture. Filled with all the things they never tell you at antenatal classes, Parenting Hell is a beguiling mixture of humour, rumination and conversation for prospective parents, new parents, old parents and never-to-be parents alike.
This started during the pandemic as ‘Lockdown Parenting Hell’ and has subsequently been rebranded ‘Parenting Hell’. And that’s without me even checking properly: goodness knows how many times he’s cropped up on Dave in that time, perhaps on a repeat of his own panel show, Hypothetical or on an old episode of Taskmaster. I read all the way to the end of the acknowledgements (my neck is stiffer than Beckett’s – another podcast reference, I am such a fangirl) and the part written to Josh’s wife and kids made me cry! I’d thoroughly recommend it to everyone (even if your youngest ‘baby’ is 11 tomorrow like mine, and your oldest one of the four is 19. Obviously Josh couldn't include everything, but one glaring omission for me was the Doctor Who TV movie on '96.It's also funny how his team Plymouth and mine Brighton started the decade in the Second Division only to tumble down to the Fourth tier in roughly the same seasons. The only reason I’d ever heard of Gus before at all, is because I moved to Devon when in my twenties in the 2000s (presumably the exact opposite of what Josh himself did) and have had people talk to me about this great, mythical, winking TV birthday bunny since.
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