Nerd Do Well

Slight change of pace this week as I venture into the seldom visited realm of the non-fictional. Yes, for all my talk of giant robots, teenage witches, board game inspired shoot-em-ups and Jesus based conspiracies, I can, when the mood takes me, be all, like, intellectual and junk.

I'm not going to be here mind you, I'm just saying I can be. No, for my first non-fiction book in a long time I've gone with a movie stars autobiography. Because that's how I roll.


Nerd Do Well is, the cover tells us, "A small boy's journey to becoming a big kid" and charts the life of Simon Pegg as he grows up, realises he's funny, and parlays that into a huge television and movie career. Jammy bastard.

Pegg is funny. He is also charming and disarmingly honest about his childhood. (I assume he's honest. If you were making stuff up, you wouldn't make some of these stories up.) He seems at times to be embarrassed by the idea that he is important or interesting enough to warrant an autobiography and some of the funniest moments are self deprecating ones.

I can relate to Pegg, in that I was and still am very much the 'geek/nerd'. His obsessions were my obsessions, his heroes mine, although the way things are looking it's highly unlikely that I'll be making any movies with Steven Spielberg any time soon so the similarities probably end there. The fact that I can relate to Pegg so strongly probably explains why I didn't feel let down by this book. Nerd Do Well is not an industry tell-all. It barely scratches the surface of Peggs career. Instead it is a deeply personal account of the man himself, his influences, his relationship with his family and the friendships that have shaped his adult life. Anyone looking for Star Trek anecdotes or scene by scene production diaries for Hot Fuzz need look elsewhere because this is not the book for them. I'd have been happy with that book, but I'm happier with this one.

And it bears repeating, Pegg is funny. Not least in the chapters, inserted throughout the book at choice moments, that are not autobiographical at all, but rather are a bizarre 3rd person narrative in which Pegg is cast as a (pompous and dim) James Bond/Batman figure, jetting around the world with his trusty robotic sidekick to take on evil geniuses intent on world domination. I don't know whether Simon Pegg has read any Robert Rankin but it was Rankins distinctive brand of 'far-fetched-fiction' that these chapters reminded me of, which is a good thing, because few can pull off this level of ridiculous, fourth wall breaking, nod and wink insanity and not fall flat on their face, and I can't help but hope that if Pegg ever decides to write a novel he dares to embrace this style completely. The world needs more toot.

This book is fried gold. You should buy it, or at least get it out of the library, if for no other reason than to look at Peggs baby photos, in which he looks exactly the same as he does today. Seriously, it's uncanny. Oh, and The Galaxys Greatest Comic, 2000AD, gets a brief but positive mention. That's 10 points right there.