The Full English: A Sunday Times bestseller

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Maconie previously worked as an English and sociology teacher at Skelmersdale College, Lancashire for one year in 1987–88.

Stuart Maconie on oatcakes, bottle ovens and turning over Stuart Maconie on oatcakes, bottle ovens and turning over

Chipping Campden, the Cotswolds village where Graham Greene lived, is “more likely to offer an antiquarian volume, an artisanal biscuit or an understated lithograph. While at St John Rigby College, Maconie formed a band named (after several iterations) Les Flirts, [1] featuring Maconie on guitar/vocals, Nigel Power on bass and Jem Bretherton on drums. A country that elects someone like Boris Johnson is just not a grown-up country,” he says with passion. The stories first appeared as blatant jokes in a spoof NME 's Believe It or Not feature, but have since been repeated elsewhere as if true.He seems to particularly appreciate his visits to the museums, the links to Arnold Bennett and how the city's industrial past and present meet in the streets. Still, I do wish that sometimes we could take a step back and say, ‘Why can’t we be more like Norway? There are echoes here of one of the more celebrated fictional jaunts through England, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in which Mr Stevens, butler for the prewar pacifist lord of Darlington Hall, embarks on his trip to the West Country – which is to say southwest England – for a reunion with Miss Kenton, ostensibly the former housekeeper but the closest he will come to knowing romantic love. His previous work, The Nanny State Made Me (Ebury Press 2020) examines the positive impact of the Welfare State through the prism of his sixties and seventies childhood as well interviews with the countless beneficiaries of its work.

‘We in England are not a grown-up country So how about

Maconie quotes an English Journey sparingly, but it becomes clear that Priestley allowed his moods and eye to dictate what he recorded.But, to come back to the question: England’s dark, bloody and sometimes great history is difficult to avoid. On the tram, or Metrolink more formally, you come into Radcliffe over the dark, swirling Irwell and rows of terraced houses. The Full English is an insightful and entertaining book that interrogates the state of England today, a ‘sustained lovers’ quarrel’ with a country that is at once home and yet – at times – unrecognisable. Maconie does, however, quote the infamous passage in the Priestley book in which the author, roaming through Liverpool’s poverty-stricken Irish community, noted that “the Irishman in England too often cuts a very miserable figure.

The Full English: Stuart Maconie - Birmingham Literature Festival The Full English: Stuart Maconie - Birmingham Literature Festival

I'm sure that if anyone had mistakenly said that Lemmy from Motörhead was from Hanley rather than Burslem he would have put them right. And it explains why those towns were the ones where Brexit happened and the red wall crumbled,” Maconie says as he prepares to board his train – he doesn’t say whether it’s running late.Like many of his generation, he delighted in being smashed by wave after wave of English pop-music invention that has rolled through every decade since. It’s a Saturday dusk, always an evocative time, redolent of the theme from Sports Report and Doctor Who. Maconie joined BBC Radio 2 in 1998, with shows such as All Singing, All Dancing, All Night, a northern soul music show, and, for several years, Stuart Maconie's Critical List on Saturday evenings.

The Full English - Off The Shelf The Full English - Off The Shelf

He said: "I'm from Wigan so I'm used to having the mick taken out of my town - and in this book I never wanted to punch down. He is a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music where, alongside Mark Radcliffe, he hosts its weekend breakfast show (Saturday–Sunday, 8 am–10 am) [3] which broadcasts from the BBC's MediaCityUK in Salford. But, as I say in the book, it is in the vested interests of the left and the right to keep the culture war going because it pays their wage.In addition to his Saturday show, on 16 April 2007, Maconie joined forces with Mark Radcliffe to present a new show on BBC Radio 2 which was broadcast between Monday and Wednesday (Monday to Thursday up to April 2010) from 8 pm to 10 pm. It features a 30-page chapter about the Potteries - and there are even some bottle ovens smoking away on the front cover. Maconie spent two years in his footsteps, and the leisurely tone pays off: he succeeds in inhabiting the slim spaces where you can feel and sometimes see vestiges of Priestley’s England nine decades later. That’s a really interesting question because that bit you mention, there are a couple of sections in the book which are the essence of what the book is about,” he says. It is described as " the weird, the wonderful and all that's in between", and is very diverse in musical content.