Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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Billy Liar is a 1959 novel by Keith Waterhouse [1] that was later adapted into a play, a film, a musical and a TV series. The work has inspired and been featured in a number of popular songs.

Stephen Tompkinson reads Keith Waterhouse's classic comic story about a young dreamer who fantasies about a more exciting life. Billy Liar marries the Angry Young Men agenda with a flippant, ironic, stiff-upper-lip aesthetic reminiscent of (a bitter) Wodehouse and Jerome - but at the same time manages to retain humanity and warmth. When I first saw the film in 1961 I was also intrigued by the glimpse it offered of a strange new world - the North of England! Billy Liar". Reel Streets. Locations. Archived from the original on 20 June 2017 . Retrieved 24 November 2014. Guide to filming locations He manages to sabotage his engagement to Barbara (aka "The Witch") by borrowing her engagement ring, supposedly to take it to the jeweller's "to be adjusted", and giving it to his other girlfriend Rita! Oh, and then there's Liz as well...It was perhaps his best-known work - the story of a funeral parlour worker with a humdrum life, who spends most of his time dreaming of ways to escape his drab existence in Yorkshire. In the 1980s, he was even called in by Margaret Thatcher's government to advise on the teaching of English. The Mirror had become Cap'n Bob's paper and he didn't mind what you put in, so long as it was about him," Waterhouse later recalled. At the dawn of the 1960s, Britain was still generally a repressed, conformist world, and this world is even more stifling and claustrophobic in the small fictional town of Stradhoughton in Yorkshire (somewhere to the north of Leeds).

The young journalist thrived in Fleet Street, with its clatter of typewriters, endless supply of gossip and long, boozy lunches (his Who's Who entry listed "lunch" as his sole recreational activity). He chose the Mail, over the pleas of every other national editor, when he left the Daily Mirror in 1986 after 35 years when the late Robert Maxwell took over. In 2004, Total Film named Billy Liar the 12th in its list of the greatest British Films of all time.The film belongs to the British New Wave, inspired by both the earlier kitchen sink realism movement and the French New Wave. Characteristic of the style is a documentary/ cinéma vérité feel and the use of real locations (in this case, many in the city of Bradford in Yorkshire [5]). At Charles' birthday party Nan takes an extra piece of cake and lets slip it is "for Jesus". Charles says it is not Jesus, it is "just a fella." Buy, borrow or beg Keith Waterhouse’s outstanding new novel. I can’t recommend it too highly. Waterhouse has an uncanny gift for recapturing every attitude, agony and phrase of childhood and youth.’ - Daily Mirror

Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, was one of Britain's most prolific authors, with more than 60 books, plays and television scripts to his credit.I first came across the name Billy Liar through the song of the same name recorded by The Decemberists in 2004, an upbeat piano driven pop song about a young man suffering from boredom, and it remains one of my favourite songs from the prolific band. Keith Waterhouse, Fleet Street columnist, wit, novelist, playwright and waspish social commentator who once described himself as "a tinroof tabernacle radical", has died at his home in London, aged 80, his family said .