Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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When he stopped in May he said that at 80 years old he felt it was time to give up working to deadlines, even though his columns remained – as always – exactly written to length and never lost their edge."

In February 2004, he was voted Britain's most admired contemporary columnist by the British Journalism Review. His career began at the Yorkshire Evening Post and he also wrote regularly for Punch, the Daily Mirror, and latterly for the Daily Mail. He initially joined the Mirror as a reporter in 1952, before he became a playwright and novelist; during his initial stint, he campaigned against the colour bar in post-war Britain, [2] the abuses committed in the name of the British Empire in Kenya [3] and the British government's selling of weapons to various Middle Eastern countries. [4] Subsequently, he returned as a columnist, initially in the Mirror Magazine, moving to the main newspaper on 22 June 1970, [5] on Mondays, and extending to Thursdays from 16 July 1970. Extracts from the columns were published in the books Mondays, Thursdays and Rhubarb, Rhubarb and Other Noises. Is it impossible for Billy to tell the truth, or is he merely a highly intelligent and imaginative youth, trapped in a conventional, working-class, North-of-England, why-you-reading-all-them-bloody-books-you-think-you’re-better-than-your-old-man type of upbringing? Billy Liar is one of those great literary persons I would like to have as a pub friend . He is a shirker of grandiose ability. He lays in bed every morning and has enumerated his mother's traditional calls up the stairs--the one that usually gets him to finally move is "Your boiled egg will be stone cold!" He amuses himself by saying random irrelevant things to his family members all the while keeping a bizarre running interior dialogue of the things he would like to say in response, and occasionally does.

A wander

Billy Liar is a short book. Joyce’s Ulysses is longer. But they both inhabit similar territory in that they follow a principal character through one day’s eventless events. Viewed in this light, Billy Liar becomes potentially much more than a comic romp through northern English quaintness. Billy is "just about thraiped wi' Stradhoughton" He tells everyone that he is off to London. But when he tries to resign from his job as an undertaker's clerk - a job he is dying to leave of course, there is a complication: the small matter of some calendars he was supposed to post nine months earlier. Like a lazy postmen hiding mail in his shed because he can't be bothered to do his rounds, Billy has stashed them all under his bed and embezzled the postage money. His hopeless attempts at getting rid of the calendars - by trying to flush them down the loo at work, for example - are comical. Billy dreams big - of becoming a famous scriptwriter, of leaving behind his drab existence and running away to London and of making it with the wonderful free spirit played by Julie Christie in the film. And, somehow, we know that none of it will happen. Courtenay’s poignant performance captures the mood of early 1960s Britain, hesitant before the prospect of liberating times ahead, while Julie Christie makes an unforgettable impression as the free-spirited local girl heading for London’s bright lights. Both were nominated for BAFTAs. Then he got a call from an old friend from Leeds, Willis Hall, now a successful playwright. Together they wrote the screenplay of Billy Liar, filmed in 1963 with Tom Courtenay as Billy and making a star of Julie Christie. The story takes place in the course of a single Saturday in a northern city and is about a young clerk, Billy Fisher, whose daydreaming and hilarious lies have brought his work and love life to a point of crisis.

Grouped with the Angry Young Men of British letters, who came to prominence in the late 50s and early 60s, Waterhouse's most famous creation is less angry with the status quo of post-war Britain than Arthur Seaton and Jimmy Porter, instead finding an escape from his frustrations by living in a dream world half of the time.

Dancing

As well as the scripts there was a growing list of novels, along with every conceivable award for his newspaper columns and his regular contributions to Punch. Although much of his work was comedy, like many professional humorists, Waterhouse hated people telling him jokes. He loved pubs and Soho drinking clubs, Gerry's in particular, but he dreaded bores, whom he savaged with a grumpy impatience. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Billy Liar tells the story of Billy Fisher, a dreamer living in the claustrophobic Yorkshire town in his parents’ house. Billy has dreams, he desperately wants to be a comedy writer and move to London. He doesn’t quite have the courage to go through with it though. His habitual embroidery of the truth, has left him tangled in a web of pointless lies. He has told:

This marvellous little novel covers a momentous Saturday in the life of nineteen-year-old Billy Fisher in a small town in Yorkshire. It’s 1959, and Billy’s lower-middleclass family wallows in the unchallenging comforts and conformity of dull, mediocre Stradhoughton. Everything is routine and predictable, which to the intelligent and creative Billy is unbearable, and he constantly retreats from the tedium into his inner fantasy world – Ambrosia – where he is a hero in the tradition of Thurber’s Walter Mitty. A British sitcom in 1973 and most improbably an American TV show starring Steve Guttenberg(!) as Billy followed, achieving nothing more than to help Keith Waterhouse accumulate wealth I'm sure. For Billy, a cultural weekend in Stratford-Upon-Avon doesn't mean having to watch Shakespeare. After persuading his parents to let his fiancée Barbara join them on the trip he is disappointed when she insists on separate rooms. [4]He fought long crusades to highlight what he perceived to be a decline in the standards of modern English; for example, he founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe, whose members attempt to stem the tide of such solecisms as "potatoe's" and "pound's of apple's and orange's" in greengrocers' shops. [7] [8] His humor is exhilarating, even when it is dark – maybe especially then – as exemplified by what he wants to put on his tombstone – ‘here lies Billy Fisher’ – in recognition of the lies he cannot help himself from spitting out repeatedly – these range from the serious, maintaining he has a job with the famous comedian Billy Boone and he is going to London, to the futile, pretending he has a dog, sister, even presenting The Witch aka Barbara, one of his three girlfriends, to the mother of his best friend and infuriating her by saying this is his sibling and the woman retorts that she knows Barbara and this lie is insulting. Waterhouse's stellar career also saw him write about 60 books, including 16 novels, plays, film scripts and TV series. In 2007, Empire praised Tom Courtenay for the main role stating: "Skulking between temerity and timidity, callousness and innocence, Tom Courtenay dominates the picture, whether defrauding his employers or duping his trio of girlfriends. But the most memorable moment remains the sight of Julie Christie on the train to London, watching Courtenay shrugging on the platform and settling for the mediocrity he despises and probably deserves." [8] Peter O'Toole, who played the lead role in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in its first West End run, said: "My friend for 50 years, the bugger wrote plays for me that were razor's edges he expected me to walk along as though they were three-lane highways. It was a privilege to have had a bash."