Stan and Ollie by Simon Louvish 533pp, Faber, £25
It is only fair that I declare a special interest here. Quarterly through my letterbox plops the Laurel and Hardy Magazine. It is a non-profit-making publication produced by the Helpmates UK Tent of the Sons of the Desert, 63 Wollaston Close, Gillingham, Kent DA5 3PF. For I am a life member, a true and loyal Son of the Desert, a geek, a Laurel and Hardy anorak. So how can I possibly give an unprejudiced opinion of a book devoted to my comic heroes, the divine duo, Stan and Ollie?
My 16mm collection includes every extant foot of film they ever made. To look at the author's bibliography is to scan my bookshelves. My best friend, Tony Hawes, was such a keen collector of everything associated with the timeless team that he married Stan's daughter, Lois. You'll understand that this leaves me with few defences against anything affectionately written about the greatest of the screen comedy partnerships. Yet moan I must.
Simon Louvish writes fluently and fully about his subjects, but he's not for speed-reading. To race too fast over his 500-odd pages is to risk running slap- bang into the sort of convoluted sentence construction that can briefly dislocate your brain. Try this: "If your first memory is, or includes, Laurel and Hardy, as my own experience, it tends to be indelible." The man's a punctuation junkie.
There is no denying the extent of the scholarship involved. The research carried out by Louvish and his colleagues is exhaustive. It's also exhausting, for he seems unwilling to omit any detail he's unearthed. Loving the subjects, as so many of us do, even I balk at wading through yet another love letter from Babe Hardy to his alcoholic wife, or the life and times of yet another forgotten performer with only the most tenuous connection to our principal figures. The imitative plays written by Stan's father and the many theatres he managed are worth an essential reference but not an entire history, chapter and verse. In short - which Louvish seldom is - his book deserved more selective editing. With a machete.
I've almost finished grumbling. So let's skip over the clumsily organised chronology, which switches the reader's attention backwards and forwards between the dates of movie-making and personal problems in a disorienting whirl. And better not to linger long over the author's aggrandisement of meanings behind the plots and jokes. In quoting nonsensical dialogue from one of the pair's weaker features, The Flying Deuces, he sees in Stan's refusal to join Ollie in an absurd suicide attempt "a desperate symbiosis, with an almost mythological ethos - that only death can finally prove friendship". Simon, trust me - it's just a gag.
On the credit side, there's an enormous amount to enjoy. There's one passage (pages 222 to 227) that contains some of the best and most incisive analysis of their movie magic I've ever read. The writer's joyful descriptions of their finest films are models of clarity, and his sorrow over their decline is movingly expressed.
Historically accurate, biographically impeccable, Louvish does more to fill in their real-life stories with little-known facts than any previous book. Mostly I enjoyed it, but then I'm a lifelong convert to the cause. As Spike Milligan once said: "From the moment I saw them on the screen I knew they were my friends."
Every successive generation loves them. My only intelligent contribution to a BBC TV programme called Cuckoo some years ago was that "kids know at once - they're not adults pretending to be children, they're children pretending to be adults".
As for the foregoing attempt to find fault with anything favourable written about them, I can only say to the literary editor of the Guardian, "Here's another fine mess you've got me into."
