I thus formulate a theory. I can't stop laughing with Latin American humor but simply couldn't get in the same happy mood when presented with the British variety. This must be because England is a much, much older country than those in the New World, or even those in Asia, which it helped discover and colonize. There's humor even in the act of death, which is pretty much the end of everything about a person. But laughter always looks favorably upon the young. A baby who gurgles and shows his toothless gums is always a jolly sight to see, but an old man who does the same thing is creepy. Find sources: "Keith Waterhouse"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2009) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Billy Liar". Reel Streets. Locations. Archived from the original on 20 June 2017 . Retrieved 24 November 2014. Guide to filming locations When I first saw the film in 1961 I was also intrigued by the glimpse it offered of a strange new world - the North of England!

Before joining the Daily Mail he worked at the Daily Mirror for 35 years, after beginning his journalism career on the Yorkshire Evening Post in Leeds. For all his personality issues, Billy is likeable (if endlessly frustrating) and very realistic; indeed, I found some disturbing echoes of my own youth when reading the novel. Waterhouse is also impeccable in his astute rendering of both the local characters and dialect, and the difficult social transition that regional England was going through at the time. There are some great comedy lines too – I have no doubt the Monty Python team took inspiration from this novel for some of their sketches, especially the Four Yorkshiremen sketch

Find sources: "Billy Liar"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( July 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) William Fisher is an intriguing, complicated, sometimes likeable, but more often infuriating main character, who has a vast, phenomenal imagination, living for much of the time in the fictional Ambrosia, where he is the prime minister – but he does have other roles – and friends of his have important positions…this is a very useful, if not sine qua non artifice, given that the reality around him can be quite bleak – he indeed takes the machine gun he has in Ambrosia and uses it on the real humans that upset him, if only in his own mind…the gun does not exist – and besides, he does know this land does not exist outside his head, as opposed to the – let us say more than a billion at the very least – people who are convinced that Qanon is real, the world is led by lizards, pedophiles and that George Soros is the ultimate Satan…oh and Covid does not exist.

I wake up with views the way some people wake up with hangovers. Sometimes I wake up with both, when the confederation of clowns presiding over our destinies had better tread carefully." Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, always described himself as a lazy man, even though he produced a body of work that reduced his Fleet Street rivals to envious dismay. Apart from the novels, plays, film scripts, sitcoms and magazine articles that flowed unceasingly from his vintage Adler typewriter (he hated new technology), he also wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, beginning in the Daily Mirror in 1970, and from 1988 for the Daily Mail, until the paper announced his retirement last May.Billy nearly emerges into the real, adult world when he’s on the moors with Liz, but he can’t seem to take the next step from “OMG, she really understands me” to “I’m in trouble Liz: all my lies are catching up with me; I’m doomed.” Perhaps his retreat from that step is simply psychological self-preservation, since the reality of his situation could easily lead to despair and depression (for which those with NPD are at higher risk). We shouldn't forget that young males 18-25 have the highest suicide rate in many Western countries. The music video for the song " The Importance of Being Idle" by Oasis contains scenes based on scenes from Billy Liar, although most of it is based on the video for the Kinks' Dead End Street.