Coach Trip is a very popular travel programme broadcast on Channel 4 television in the UK. It is presented by a very likeable and camp man called Brendan, this is his memoir.
This book covers Brendan's life from his birth in 1959 to 2011, with the content relating to the Coach Trip television programme from 2004. It is not until you have read 53% of this memoir before Coach Trip is mentioned, so the title is a little misleading. However this memoir is easy to relate to and is told in the same soft manner as he uses on the television programme. Brendan is only 5 months younger than me and I found it very easy to fall into his shoes as he described the social themes of the day as his memoir moved forward.
I found this book not the best of reads. Brendan gives a very long name check of all the people he has met overs the years. This name dropping became rather tedious after a while! The anecdotes he raises are quite poor and short. The funniest being about a donkey in Ireland. There is a lot of moving around and Brendan never lives in one place for long. Each new home has a long description and when he leaves there is another tedious roll call of the people left behind.
The information I got from this book about the Coach Trip television programme was very poor. Programme makers can be quite lazy and a full day’s filming is edited down to just 30 minutes for broadcast. But Brendan does reveal a lot about the Catholic church, the way it deals with homosexuals and the personal grief experienced when his partner of 25 years Les, died at the age of 59.
This book is an okay read and solves the readers' curiosity about a celebrity life. It is not a thrilling read and is like someone getting back from holiday and telling you about what a nice time they had. Brendan is not the best of storytellers but I will still vote his memoir 3 stars because of how he explains the challenges of being a homosexual to a wider audience.
My life is available as an Amazon Kindle eBook and was written in 2011 and republished in 2012 when Brendan added a lengthy postscript.
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