Happy-Go-Lucky, by David

Hancock has long kept a home in France, and the xenophobia the referendum churned up she took personally. ‘Everything I believed in and, in my small way, fought for, has seemingly been abandoned’ – liberal virtues, European unity.

She’d liked the prospect of ‘a big, multicultural, European hotchpotch of races, striving to share our wealth and success and troubles with one another’. Her picture was bigger than trade deals and economics – Hancock wanted to commingle with a world that gave us Beethoven.

What’s horrible, in Hancock’s reckoning, is the populism suddenly revealed – whipped up by all these chancers who’d not have been out of place in the thirties: Rees-Mogg (‘patronising, insensitive, condescending and appallingly derisive’), scruffy Dominic Cummings (whose ‘simplistic brainwashing slogans’ are worthy of Hitler), Farage (with his ‘obscene, gape-mouthed, roaring laugh’), Boris Johnson (‘has worked hard on his boyish messiness’) and Trump (‘nasty, tacky, with silly blow-dried hair’).

The trouble is, Hancock can’t rant about this to her contemporaries, as they are either dead or doolally, ‘apathetic and detached’, preferring to talk about tea and cakes.

Yet if old people are bores, truly animated only when subjects such as strokes and knee replacements come up, Hancock, at nearly 90, is aware of physical deterioration. Rheumatoid arthritis is her latest burden – limbs and extremities full of pain, inflammation levels in the joints elevated.

She’s been prescribed heavy doses of steroids, which ‘gave me frenetic energy’. Suddenly the actress was scrabbling on the peaks of Scottish mountains and going on narrow-boat excursions with Gyles Brandreth, who tripped on the poop deck and blackened his eye.

Then the pandemic came about and Hancock underwent house imprisonment – which she didn’t much mind, even if her earnings fell to £57.38, her slice of the DVD sales of a television programme shown abroad. London free of motor traffic was blissful. Bird song could be heard. Plants sprouted along the Thames.

But it’s more than this. Twenty years on from being widowed – Hancock’s book about John Thaw’s terminal cancer and her bereavement, The Two of Us, is rightly an established classic – if her grief is blunted, it is because Hancock has discovered the joys of solitude.

‘I have freedom,’ she now says. ‘I can live a totally selfish life, eat when I like, go where I like … without having to fit in with someone else’s life.’ Lockdown consolidated this.

Thaw, by all accounts, was a moody article, reclusive, friendless by choice – his taciturnity the result of shyness, apparently, or being northern. Hancock can still feel ‘his presence, his energy’; their marriage was, as she says, ‘turbulent’ – but all of this made him the great actor he was, his characters, like Morse, temperamentally chippy, dissatisfied.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of Old Rage is Hancock’s perceptive description of performers: Russell Brand’s ‘edge of mad recklessness’, Nicholas Parsons’s ‘old-fashioned cravat-and-blazer-type charm’. Like many comics, Brian Rix was ‘an intensely serious man’. Vera Lynn’s gift was that ‘she didn’t dance about and pull funny faces. She just stood there.’

I fully endorse Hancock’s amazement that we have been allowed to forget the likes of James Mason, Kenneth More, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton.

Aware she’ll be remembered chiefly for playing Senna Pod in Carry On Cleo – and there’s nothing wrong with that – Hancock, who has worked up from OBE to CBE and now DBE, looks back with nostalgia at the theatres after the war: the ‘cracked black-pitted mirrors surrounded by broken light bulbs’, and mice eating the make-up sticks.

Her co-star in Torquay and Bournemouth was a bombastic David Baron, who had ambitions to be a writer. He changed his stage name back to his original name, Harold Pinter, and went on to do quite well.

NICHOLAS LEZARD Happy-Go-Lucky By David Sedaris Little, Brown £18.99

I shall begin with a disclaimer of sorts: parts of this review may be motivated by envy.

For what Sedaris does is, essentially, what I do in the New Statesman: that is, mine my personal life for humorous or wry observations. The crucial difference is that Sedaris is, by several orders of magnitude, wealthier than me.

To illustrate: I live in a tiny onebedroom flat in Brighton which I can barely afford; Sedaris bought the flat on the floor above his in central Manhattan so that his partner could practise the piano undisturbed by anyone else’s presence.

And, to make things somehow worse, we learn in this book that his sister Amy, with whom he has many times collaborated, bought the flat upstairs from her central Manhattan apartment so she could have a break from her pet rabbit, who had apparently been running amok.

Somehow I don’t think either of these apartments is tiny, and if Sedaris’s piano isn’t one of the better grands, I will be very much surprised.

That said, Sedaris is very good at what he does, as you probably know, for he has been a regularly recurring performer on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra; and his books sell well, too. And he also works really hard, spending months at a time on tour. So I suppose he deserves his comforts, as I do mine.

And also: he really, really wants it. I notice this in the first piece in this book, ‘Active Shooter’, in which he and one of his other sisters, Lisa, go to a shooting range in North Carolina called ProShots. The instructor, for some reason, decides he is called Mike, not David. Here is Sedaris’s reaction: ‘From then until the time we left, my name was Mike, which was more than a little demoralising. Not getting the “Wait a minute – the David Sedaris?” was bad enough, but being turned into a Mike, of all things?’

Note that ‘was bad enough’. I have had ‘Are you Nicholas Lezard?’ three times in my life, and two of those times the person asking the question was a bailiff.

Elsewhere, he retells a story about the legendary American humorous columnist Russell Baker, and Baker’s mother’s being (possibly because of dementia) wholly unimpressed that her son had