Mack The Life

Product Information

If you are a fan of Lee Mack you will enjoy this book - telling the story of his life with honesty and humour up to the point when he became a regular face on our TV screens. He manages to balance his personal and public life well, giving us a bit of insight into his head and how he got to where he is but also drawing clear lines as to where we weren't invited to go. The book is well worth a read just to find out how many years it took Lee to finally stand up on a stage and do his comedy routines.

I really enjoyed all the bits with Angela McHale, and what a fabulous, unique idea to perform them as little sketches. I think there’s far too many comedians who talk about their personal issues,’ he tells her in the first session. This was never going to be a literary work of art but it was a very entertaining read that I stayed up into the small hours to finish.

Hilarious and brilliant, it’s the kind of book which reminds you why you learned to read in the first place.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He even goes as far as to imply that the people who enjoyed those jokes weren't particularly clever, because the jokes were quite simple. It’s all part of his approach that comedy is career like any other, albeit much more rewarding, and, unlike some of his peers, he wants to enjoy a life away from it too. Mack is of distant part-Irish descent, which was explored in the 2018 season of the British television programme Who Do You Think You Are? He hired her in hopes of adding some depth to the book (which he says he did go back and retool the book some after meeting with her).The fact that they kept having to find new actresses for NGO and he briefly mentions that it could be because he put them through the wringer, didn't help my perception that it's more about the destination than the journey for Mack. Some scenes have been edited for the sake of brevity, but other than that are taken directly from recordings of the actual conversations. And what does a man do when his close mate of over six months at the pub vanishes, leaving him with only (spoiler alert) a dozen photographs of his life? The psychiatrist sections just made the whole book, well the portion I listened to, to feel disjointed and didn’t really add anything of value.

This is an indispensable read not only for fans of Lee Mack, but for any would be Comedian wanting to break into the comedy circuit or Comedian wanting to take their career to the next level for it vividly highlights the plain old fashioned hard work, inevitable set backs and the smattering of luck that is required to go on to become a professional stand-up Comedian. He will also play the lead role in Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' The Unfriend from December 2023 until March 2024, with Frances Barber and Sarah Alexander.

The result is a down-to-earth appraisal of how to get into comedy, with a healthy suspicion of TV folk and people who take the business too seriously. Mack is a darts fan, and regularly plays with his friend and former Not Going Out co-star, Tim Vine.

Lee Mack and Neil Webster's I Can't Believe It's Not Buddha podcast almost scored a book deal within its first 10 episodes. I enjoyed every part of it and interspersing the autobiography with talks to a psychiatrist was an amazing idea, really insightful. Unfortunately, the only responses he got from that advert were lots of men looking to pay him for sexual favors. Both men appeared on the debut series of Let's Play Darts, facing each other in the final, with Mack and his partner Martin Adams beating Vine and his partner Darryl Fitton. In June 2012, Mack was one of the compères at Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace in London, introducing Cliff Richard, Ed Sheeran, and Madness.

This is something else I like about the book: He recognizes the difference between telly people and normal people. Finally, each chapter ends with a transcription of meetings he had with a psychologist who read an earlier draft of the book. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Not only that, once on stage, it’s about proving yourself worthy, as far as paying audiences are concerned, of standing on that stage. And it gives him the chance to tell some little anecdotes and truths about himself that wouldn’t really fit the narrative in the actual chapters of the book.