Stuart Prebble: Grumpy Old Men

There are more obvious ways to produce a TV ratings winner than to get a group of middle-aged men together and tell them to do lots of complaining. But the fact that there's now an official handbook to the BBC series Grumpy Old Men tells you all you need to know. They hurrumphed, the viewers grinned and then tuned in again next week. A hit series was born. Strange but true.

And actually, it's not so strange. The book of the series is only intermittently entertaining, but its best moments are very funny indeed, and it had me nodding and muttering "that is SO true" more often than I like to admit. As a piece of counter-
programming, inviting a bunch of opinionated old farts to be witty at the expense of anything and everything that's ever got their goat
probably rates as one of the shrewder ideas of recent times.

Suburban four-wheel drives. Pretentious restaurant menus.

Movies that start 20 minutes later than the advertised time. This is a book-length rant, and a large part of the pleasure of
reading its litany of petty complaints is the recurrent thought: "Ha! So I'm not the only one who thinks that!"

Problems: a lot of the material is too Britain-
specific to be exported. And I could seriously have done without the bits about how the poor old babyboomers thought the post-60s world would be a better place, and then the 80s happened, and so naturally they felt aggrieved. But on the whole, this is a funnier, smarter book than it has any right to be. If you have a grizzly 45-year-old male in your life, go ahead and buy it for him. If you don't ... be glad. But read the book anyway. Your inner grumpy old man will thank you.

BBC Books
$29.99

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.