Friday 15 January 2016

Review: Very British Problems, by Rob Temple

This book is based on the Twitter account SoVeryBritish, of which I’m a follower.

The brand of humour is a mixture of old-fashioned British understatement and absolute repression, mingled with the new-fangled brevity of Twitter.

Not unlike the Darwin Awards, or the book I shall review next week (How Britain Kept Calm And Carried On, by Anton Rippon), it’s more a book for diving into for a little while rather than one to be devoured at once. More a handful of Dolly Mixtures than a Yorkshire pudding.

Most of the book consists of lines taken straight from Twitter, carved up into themed chapters. Whether you enjoy the book will be apparent almost from the off. If you like the humour on page one, the odds are you’ll enjoy the whole thing. Personally, I found it to be entertaining generally, and occasionally very amusing. As comedy’s very subjective, I would advocate checking a sample.

In addition to the tweet anthology approach, there are a few sections which I think were written just for the book. The humour is in the same vein, and these bits offer something extra to ardent followers of the Twitter feed (I’m both a lazy tweeter [ @MorrisF1 for ‘serious’ stuff and @HeroOfHornska for drunken nonsense from Sir Edric] and so most of the tweets were new to me, despite being a follower).

So, if you enjoy reading of the inherent awkwardness of Britishness, you may very well enjoy this book. I did.


Thaddeus

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