The Sunday Times show business book of the year

Just Me by Sheila Hancock
Bloomsbury £18.99
Our society doesn't quite expect widows to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres, but it still frequently seems to believe that, for a septuagenarian widow, life is essentially over. Hancock's second volume of memoirs is a gloriously spirited riposte to such a notion. Her previous memoir about her life with John Thaw, The Two of Us, was a deservedly acclaimed bestseller, but Just Me is every bit as good. Well aware, and intensely irritated, that life without Thaw has left her with ‘deep depression', ‘utterly detached' and in serious danger of ‘boring the arse off everyone', her answer is to sell the house and take off for various adventures in Milan, Budapest and Thailand. Magnificent.

HEATH: A Family's Tale by JANET FIFE-YEOMANS
Pier 9 £16.99
Of all the cut'n'paste Heath Ledger books to have appeared recently, this one from a fellow Aussie may be the most intelligent and sympathetic. A profoundly thoughtful and truly talented screen actor, Ledger might have developed into one of the greats. In the end it wasn't wild, drug-fuelled orgies that did for him, but a bad combination of undiagnosed mental illness (manic depression, probably) and a consequent over-reliance on sleeping pills. His death was undoubtedly accidental, and this portrait of his life as a film star is painfully unglamorous: flying back across the Atlantic to his lonely, barely furnished New York apartment after filming The Dark Knight, suffering from pneumonia, jet-lagged, depressed, unable to sleep. Stepping out for a solitary drink wearing a ski mask and hoodie, buying a few groceries, then returning home “with only his iPod and mobile phone for company”. An exceptionally sad story.

PHALLIC FRENZY: Ken Russell and His Films by JOSEPH LANZA
Aurum £18.99
Vanessa Redgrave reckons that Ken Russell's The Devils is one of the “chief works of genius in the post-war British cinema”. Some might beg to differ with Vanessa on this, as on other things, regarding his films as neither provocative nor profound but merely silly. Lanza, however, clearly regards Russell as a genius. He also thinks Southampton is a “quiet seaside town”, and his dismissal of the Mary Whitehouse phenomenon (all “horn-rimmed glasses” and “schoolmarm tones”) is hopelessly clichéd. Yet despite its flaws, this is still a highly enjoyable portrait of a true British eccentric. Russell's life, from a boyhood spent listening to the bombs of the Luftwaffe falling, through the heady, liberated days of the 1960s, to his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, seems somehow representative of the trajectory of the past few decades. Today, Russell is reduced to funding his own projects, releasing his latest novel, Brahms Gets Laid, as an e-book, writing scripts such as A Kitten for Hitler, and making home movies featuring deformities, rabid nuns, conger eels and a character with an elephant's trunk for a penis. But nobody is watching any more.

50 YEARS OF CARRY ON by RICHARD WEBBER
Century £18.99
What a peculiar bunch they were: Sid James like a depraved monkey, Kenneth Williams frenziedly purring and yowling, Charles Hawtrey like a bad-tempered, alcoholic schoolboy. We shall not look upon their like again. As Webber notes towards the end of this jolly account, a new Carry On film is being put together even now, starring Vinnie Jones. Hmm. Say what you like about Vinnie, he's no Kenneth Williams. Webber understands the Carry On phenomenon entirely; how it's all about the oddness, the dowdiness, the sheer physical uncomfortableness of the British - and their frank terror of sex, best coped with by laughing at it. Hence all those characters such as Doctor Nookey, WC Boggs and the Khasi of Kalabar. Ah, never such innocence again. Carry On films were “cheap, full of predictable jokes and situations, obvious charact-erisations and a fair dollop of continuity errors”, and as quintessentially British as a tray of soggy chips in the rain.

PARKY: My Autobiographyby MICHAEL PARKINSON
Hodder £20
“Meet the man who has met everyone,” says the strapline on the book's jacket. But Parky didn't just meet them, he revealed them to us with his modest, deceptively simple and only occasionally sycophantic interviewing technique. His kind of chat show seems to have died out; but he observes that old-style stars have died out, too. They had “a hinterland, a background, a testimony”, unlike today's overnight celebs. James Stewart wasn't merely a “celluloid hero”, “he had flown in combat” over Germany, while Robert Mitchum, even when he was swigging from a vodka bottle in the hospitality room, “had a majestic quality”. Perhaps they somehow knew they represented America at its moment of greatest power. Today's screen stars seem a lot more anxious.

UP TILL NOW by WILLIAM SHATNER
Sidgwick £18.99
Surely the funniest showbiz memoir of the year, and not just for Trekkie fans either. Shatner has a sense of the ridiculous more finely tuned than anything Scotty could manage with the Enterprise's warp drive, and his autobiography is chock-full of jokes and anecdotes. There's young Shatner motoring across America for one of his first acting jobs in a Morris Minor, “a compromise between a very small car and nothing”. There's his work on Incubus, a little-known film shot entirely in Esperanto. “The French were quite enthusiastic about it, apparently because they didn't understand a word of it.” An early review of Star Trek said that Captain Kirk was “wooden”, and Shatner harks back to it relentlessly for the rest of the book. “As a professional actor, those things don't bother me. And that particular review has continued not to bother me for more than four decades.” And there's his tireless promotion of his online store, williamshatner.com, where if you spend more than $50 you will also receive, absolutely free, a “Trelane: The Squire of Gothos nine-inch action figure while supplies last.” (When I looked, the offer had been discontinued.) Who could resist?

BLADE RUNNERS, DEER HUNTERS, AND BLOWING THE BLOODY DOORS OFF by MICHAEL DEELEY
Faber £18.99
This is a fascinating, British producer's insider view of the movie business. Deeley has worked on some of the best British films, including The Italian Job, Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man, as well as in Hollywood. Although producers are usually regarded as the accountants of the film world, grey, dull and universally unpopular, Deeley is clearly a man with strong opinions and an excellent memory for detail. Sam Peckinpah may have been a great director, but he was a pain in the arse to work with; Nicholas Roeg directed like nobody else on earth. And there is a wonderful image of Rutger Hauer's first meeting with Ridley Scott, auditioning for the part of Roy in Blade Runner. Hauer was dressed in “pink silk pants and a Kenzo sweater with a fox fur draped over his shoulder. He had bleached his hair and was wearing Elton John-style glasses...Ridley was convinced I had foisted on him a gay activist to play the most aggressively masculine part in the picture”.

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