Funny Girl
Now The Major TV Series Funny Woman Starring Gemma Arterton
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3.9 • 52 Ratings
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Make them laugh, and they're yours forever . . .
Barbara Parker is Miss Blackpool of 1964, but she doesn't want to be a beauty queen. She wants to make people laugh. So she leaves her hometown behind, takes herself to London, and overnight she becomes the lead in a new BBC comedy, Sophie Straw: charming, gorgeous, destined to win the nation's hearts.
Funny Girl is the story of a smash-hit TV show and the people behind the scenes. But when life starts imitating art, they all face a choice. How long can they keep going before it's time to change the channel?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We couldn’t wait to get our hands on the latest novel from Nick Hornby—and Funny Girl doesn’t disappoint. Filled with the author’s trademark wit and warmth, the novel evokes a ‘60s Britain that feels familiar even to those who didn't experience the era’s cult TV comedies and sexual permissiveness firsthand. The story follows provincial beauty Barbara Parker as she throws off her Miss Blackpool crown, rechristens herself Sophie Straw, and heads to London to try her hand at being a comedian. We loved Hornby’s touching tale of an ordinary young woman who isn’t afraid to chase her dreams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barbara Parker of 1960s Blackpool is a big fish in a small pond beautiful, astute, and with aspirations of making it in television like her idol Lucille Ball. Upon moving to London, Barbara changes her name to Sophie and gets her big break. She walks in to an audition she's not suited for and leaves with the writers excited to pen a show specifically for her. The majority of Hornby's clever novel follows Sophie and her creative circle of friends through the success of the subsequent program on BBC. There's Clive, Barbara's foppish costar, Tony and Bill, the bantering and bickering writing partners who pen each episode, and Dennis, the producer who alternately fights for their program's creative direction and struggles to hide his growing fondness for Sophie, a woman he believes is completely out of his league. Hornby wonderfully captures the voice and rhythms of broadcast television of the time, and seems to delight in endless inversions of art imitating life imitating art, his characters inspiring and feeding upon the storylines they produce. The result is a delightful collection of characters that care as much as they harm, each struggling to determine who they want to be.
Customer Reviews
An okay read
Not a page turner. Not one of his best, just a okay read.
Disappointed!
As a long standing fan of Nick Hornby writing, I am very disappointed. It feels like it wasn't actually him who wrote a book. I didn't even think of downloading a sample first, I loved all of his books. Money down the drain. Try downloading a sample first, and see if you'll like it - it won't get better than this.
Quite entertaining
Ok, but I didn't really warm to the characters and kept waiting for the story to get going which it never really seemed to do.