Jack Whitehall

Michael Whitehall

This book is a portrait of the pretty odd relationship I have with my elderly father. It's given me an opportunity to share memories of him losing his temper with foreigners on holidays, being rude to my mother's family at Christmas and failing epically during the fathers' race at my prep school. He's also written some stories about me, but can I just say before you read anything that I recall being a calm, well-behaved and learned child, not the intellectually subnormal, mal-coordinated dipshit that he paints me as. Nor am I, as he suggests inside, a sex addict, a flasher or a scientologist. Jack How dare Jack refer to me as elderly! People always tell me how young I look for my age. In this book, I have at last been able to recount the many occasions when I have been let down by my only son. He failed on the stage, the sports field and he even screwed up the interview for his first boarding school by pretending he had mental health issues. Despite being practically illiterate, he tells stories about me, strewn with grammatical errors and peppered with endless exaggerations and lies. I was a kind, doting father, who guided his son through his formative years with love, care and respect. Michael I'm not your 'only son', what about Barnaby? Oh yes, I forgot about Barnaby.

Him and Me

Hilary Whitehall

One part Lonely Planet, one part tell-all family memoir, this is the definitive and hilarious guide on how to survive your family holiday, by Jack Whitehall, with a little bit of help from Michael and Hilary Whitehall. No one family has more experience of travelling together than the Whitehalls. Indeed they've been allowing us a window to their escapades for the past five years in the hit Netflix show 'Travels with my Father' and in this hilarious book they have now decided to pool their advice for fellow travellers. To lay out the pitfalls of family holidays. The dos and don'ts, the highs and lows. In doing so they are sharing some of their best anecdotes. Their most extreme experiences and their most valuable advice. It is part memoir of family life, part travel guide, and full on, laugh-out-loud funny. Whatever your version of holiday preparation the truth is always this: if it is with one's own family, no amount of sunshine, wine or holiday spirit will stop your worst character traits coming to the surface. You have just volunteered to spend a week in close proximity with the people who know you best and who will never ever let you forget a f***-up. No one survives unscathed. Things are always going to end in tears, you can only hope they're of laughter.

The hilarious Sunday Times bestseller from the stars of Travels with my Father

How to Survive Family Holidays

'Backing into the Spotlight is a hilarious and an unashamedly non-PC memoir . . . Now in his eighth decade, Whitehall is a fine raconteur, gloriously unreconstructed and still deeply suspicious of modernity' Daily Mail Standing in front of a full-length mirror in my dressing room at ITV studios, waiting to go on to the set of Backchat, I had a brief conversation with my reflection. 'Michael, what the f*** do you think you're doing?' Theatrical agent Michael Whitehall spent a career pushing others into the spotlight. He had been involved behind the scenes with the careers of many prominent actors, including Colin Firth, Richard Griffiths, Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Courtenay, Ian Ogilvy, Judi Dench, Edward Fox, Michael Fassbender, Angela Thorne and Nigel Havers. But then, much to his surprise, his son Jack becomes a successful comedian and actor and decides that his new comedy partner should be his father. Whitehall Snr. finds himself reluctantly appearing on stage and then television, cast as the archetypal grumpy old man and thrust, in his early seventies, into a whole new career in front of the camera. Minor fame comes at a sedate pace: one of the highlights being a record £300,000 win for charity with Jack on Channel 4's The Million Pound Drop. In this enchanting memoir Whitehall looks back on his life, from growing up in suburban London in the 1940s and '50s with his saintly father and social climbing-mother, who coined the phrase 'à la carte' to describe people who were posher than she was and whose company she craved, to falling into a career as a successful theatrical agent and producer. As he says, 'Actors can be egotistical, greedy and vain, but they're not half as bad as agents and producers.' Charming, gossipy and above all very funny, Backing Into The Spotlight is no ordinary show business memoir.

A Memoir

Backing into the Spotlight

In his memoir, 'Shark-Infested Waters', Michael Whitehall, a leading British theatrical agent, contrasts the glamorous image of theatrical life with the mundane realities of the business, while passing on some startling trade secrets along the way.

Shark-infested Waters

"Theatrical agent Michael Whitehall has been involved with the careers of actors ranging from Kenneth More, Tom Courtenay, Colin Firth, Dorothy Tutin, Edward Fox, Jack Davenport, Judi Dench, Ian Charleson, Peter Bowles, Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden to Nigel Havers, James Fox, Angela Thorne, Richard E Grant, Stewart Granger, Anton Rodgers, Patrick Macnee, John Le Mesurier, Daniel Day Lewis, David Hemmings and Richard Griffiths.In Shark-Infested Waters, Whitehall deftly sketches the social comedy of his eccentric background: growing up in suburban London in the 1950s, his schooldays at Ampleforth, where he was taught by Basil Hume, and his subsequent adventures as a prep school master ? before becoming an actors? agent.From his eccentric grandfather ? who set the curtains twitching with his penchant for cross-dressing ? to his mother Nora?s aspirations to genteel living, complete with Pekinese Foxgrove Candy Floss ? Michael Whitehall sketches the foibles of his own family with the same deliciously dry wit he reveals when talking about his clients."

Michael Whitehall

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