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The Fast Show
The Fast Show
Jul 9, 2025 7:44 AM

Author:Paul Whitehouse,Harry Enfield,Paul Whitehouse,Simon Day,Charlie Higson,John Thomson,Caroline Aherne,Arabella Weir,Mark Williams

The Fast Show

Suits you, Sir!

With a host of memorable characters and catch-phrases, The Fast Show was one of the most popular BBC TV comedy shows ever. The talents of Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Caroline Aherne, Simon Day and many more come together in this collection of selected TV episodes and special edition of The Fast Show Live.

This compilation of sketches from the comedy series, features characters such as Ted and Ralph, coughing Bob Fleming, the "Suit you, sir" tailors from hell, and the bloke in the stupid hat. Pop down to the jazz club, the football field with Ron Manager or check in on the weather with Channel 9. It's bound to be a Scorchio!

All the favourite characters plus new sketches are included in this hilarious collection, plus a bonus collection of sketches taken from the live stage performance of BBC TV's top comedy show.

Reviews

In Haylah Swinton, Rebecca Elliott has created a funny, vulnerable, relatable teenager . . . This book is jam-packed with heart and humour, meaning you'll fly through the pages to see what happens to Haylah. Featuring perfect female friendships and jam-packed with laugh-out-loud moments, this is a brilliant debut.

—— Askew & Holts

Elliott writes teenagers well, refraining from trying to use any slang . . . and just focusing on the issues that seem to come up for all teenagers, no matter what new tech is added to their life. It's also so refreshing to read about a young woman with ambition and passion that is not, say, a vampire/werewolf love interest . . . [Haylah] is a realistic character I believe plenty of teenagers would identify with . . . I wish this book had been written when I was a teenager!

—— Funny Women

reminiscent of the masterly Stephen Lloyd Jones

—— thebookbag.co.uk

Alexander has crafted a gripping page-turner successfully blending history and fiction with magic and sorcery; truly a wonderfully and uniquely inspired novel.

—— Historical Novel Society

Immersive and fascinating…Don't miss this one.

—— Mur Lafferty, John W. Campbell Award-winning author of The Shambling Guides

Offers up the most successful blending of mystery, historical intrigue and occult fantasy since Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian…Brilliant and multilayered.

—— J.D. Horn, author of the Witching Savannah series

With its intoxicating blend of historical detail, occult magic, and modern drama, Rebecca Alexander’s debut novel is rich with intrigue and suspense.

—— Jodi McIsaac, author of the Thin Veil series

“This book is a winged creation, and absolutely marvelous. Gonzales keeps turning the kaleidoscope to reveal the strangest, darkest, and most beautiful dimensions of human love, and the conversion of mechanical fury into living strength.”

—— Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

“[W]hen it comes to fiction it usually doesn’t bring out the LOLs so much as me laughing on the inside. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find myself cracking up during some of the fight scenes and especially a bunch of the lines with curses while listening to the audiobook of The Regional Office is Under Attack!

—— BookRiot

“So fresh and so funny, the pacing is so fast and crackling, you won't be able to stop reading.”

—— Tor

“I wanted to go for a ride and The Regional Office is Under Attack! took me on one… I was rewarded with pure satisfaction.”

—— BookRiot, The Best Books of 2016 So Far

“This book is a romp if ever there was one. . . This book is just as exciting as the explanation point in its title makes it sound. It’s the kind of read every reader hungers for.”

—— Bustle

“You may not be familiar with the name Manuel Gonzales, but once you’ve had the pleasure of delving into one of his out-of-the-ordinary literary creations, you won’t forget it… In his debut novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, Gonzales conjures a futuristic world of super-powered female assassins… Backstory on each character and the Regional Office itself is delicately spliced between action-packed scenes, making this a wonderfully choreographed narrative. The moment you think you have a grasp on the truth about the Regional Office, Gonzales tosses in a twist that will have you questioning your understanding all over again… The amount of detail Gonzales infuses into this world makes it come alive in an engaging, quirky and delightful way, creating a perfect backdrop to a page-turning plot. Gonzales' tale has something for every reader: Double agents! Secret romantic trysts! Conspiracy! Fight scenes! Friendships gone awry! At its core, however, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is ultimately a tale of vengeance—one during which you’ll find yourself struggling to choose a side.”

—— BookPage

“You might want to get a firm grip on your socks before cracking open this one; otherwise, Gonzales is likely to knock them off. It’s very difficult to categorize this mind-bending novel… it’s pure excitement… A brilliant genre-blender.”

—— Booklist (STARRED review)

“The narrative not only bounces between perspectives in short, propelling chapters, but also pinballs in time... Gonzales writes with an abundance of imagination, riffing on comic book and pop culture plot lines and characters while adding his own unique perspective... there are moments of brilliance.”

—— Publishers Weekly

“A hyperkinetic sci-fi set piece along the lines of Die Hard seeded with paranormal elements cribbed from half a dozen other franchises and the absent-parent grudges that fuel any number of teen novels. … Genre enthusiasts will love the spooky cyberpunk spirit at play here, and resolute readers will be rewarded with an unexpected ending that ratchets up the action long after the Regional Office has been abandoned. A surprisingly erudite bit of sci-fi that throws in everything but the kitchen sink.”

—— Kirkus

The Voice in My Ear is so devastatingly perceptive and intimidatingly accomplished in a range of modes that it's hard to sit still while you're reading; often I found myself pacing up and down the hallway in raptures at the quality of the prose or terror at the exquisitely harrowing turn of the plot. Aside from the formal mastery, Leviston is fearless in facing difficult truths of which lesser writers never even get within telescopic range. Uncompromising and stricken but delivered through beautiful observation and unrivalled emotional and intellectual insight.

—— Luke Kennard

What an extraordinary book, so dense with understanding about personhood and relatedness, about connection, disconnection and unconnection. Frances Leviston puts her distinctive and compelling style at the service of a precise, sinuous, at times agonisingly subcutaneous storytelling. There's a clarity and superobservancy of the everyday that she conveys along with 'the sorrow that never was said': the hidden, the unspeakable, that shapes so much of experience.

—— David Hayden

This heated, haunted debut is about the dark, violent knots we carry inside ourselves – and what happens when they start to unravel. A lyric, frightening portrayal of what it means to move through the world in female form.

—— Sue Rainsford

The absorbing stories that make up Frances Leviston's The Voice in My Ear do what fiction does best, swimming deep in complexity and ambivalence. A work of high emotional intelligence and narrative control.

—— Rob Doyle

Absolutely exquisite, combining just the right amount of sweet and sour. The characters in The Voice in my Ear haunted me long after I'd finished reading. Leviston has an uncanny ability to turn a small moment into a kind of meditation on humanity.

—— Jan Carson

The poet Frances Leviston brings her razor-sharp observations to prose.

—— Monocle

The Bass Rock is a multi-generational modern gothic triumph. It is spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel.

—— Max Porter

A brutal portrait of male violence, as unchanging down the centuries as the coastal rock of the title… Cleverly constructed, full of electric scene-making, and harnessing an eerie energythe novel ends in hope.

—— Anthony Cummins , i

Everything [Evie Wyld] has published has left me excited and slightly (very) envious of her ability… And then came The Bass RockSomething extremely special… The book takes on an immense power. This is the best book of the #MeToo eraAn absolute blinder.

—— Fran Slater , Bookmunch

Vividly told and compellingThe Bass Rock isbeautifully written and powered by blistering force and righteous anger.

—— Alice O'Keefe , Bookseller

Evie Wyld is exceptionally good at the gruesome… Her bewitching third novelThe Bass Rock is beautifully written and its particular brand of macabre is all Evie Wyld’s own. The tension, foreboding and sense of inevitability are hard to shake off, even once the final page is turned. Its atmosphere is so powerful that you feel you need to go for a walk afterwards.

—— Cressida Connolly , Literary Review

A dark, gristly marvel of a novel. The Bass Rock held me in thrall from cover to cover. Evie Wyld is a gothic genius: her narrative of the violence inflicted on women throughout the centuries and the seething, female anger left in its wake left me with a deep sense of disquiet that will doubtless remain for years to come.

—— Hannah Kent

A fierce novel exploring the subjugation of – and violence against – women through the ages.

—— Hannah Beckerman , Observer

I savoured this wonderful novel; it is so extraordinarily clear-eyed and vivid, sharply disturbing yet deeply compassionate. What an amazing achievement.

—— Megan Hunter

Wonderfully subtle and magnificently savage.

—— Claire Fuller

Evie Wyld's vivid, visceral writing has long been in a class of its own – and as beautiful as it is terrifying, as moral as it is furious, The Bass Rock is her at her unflinching best.

—— Melissa Harrison

Amazingly good. The Bass Rock will fill the air around you with angry ghosts and you will be glad in their company.

—— Adam Foulds

Wyld’s The Bass Rock is her third novel and best so farthis is Wyld’s masterpiece – as majestic and monumental as the landmark it’s named after.

—— Alex Preston , Observer, *Books to Look Our For in 2020*

A bewitching and atmospheric novel, laced with dread. It reveals the haunted house of society, with its echoes of damaged and extinguished lives, but is also illuminated by beautiful observation about people, and their capacity for both violence and empathy.

—— James Scudamore

I loved The Bass Rock and found it menacing, sophisticated, magical and also very funny – the best book yet by a wonderful writer.

—— Anjali Joseph

Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock sounds fascinating… Wyld has a luminous prose style, and to see how she copes with 300 years and Scottish doubleness (or tripleness) is high on my list of “to reads”.

—— Stuart Kelly , Scotland on Sunday

Beautifully written, [The Bass Rock] is a reminder of female folklore and the power of giving words to women.

—— Stylist *10 glorious new books to buy this March*

Ambitious in scope… The physical atmosphere of the Bass Rock and its surroundings are wonderfully evoked… But it is the relationships between women in this tessellated work that triumph... I wholly recommend this book.

—— William Jolt , Tablet, *Novel of the Week*

Wyld is often praised for her lyrical prose, and The Bass Rock is most certainly a continuation of this form.

—— Julie Vuong , Skinny

[A] dark, beautiful and funny gothic family saga for the #MeToo generation… an atmospheric book that transports you within a few sentences… The tension is always building as the story takes on an otherworldly dimension.

—— Charlotte Cripps , Independent

The Bass Rock is complex, rich, challenging… Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Bass Rock offers a universal history of subjugation and oppressionViolenceruns through the book like veins in marbleVivid and gripping.

—— Irish Times

A gripping look at three women's stories across four centuries.

—— Joanne Finney , Good Housekeeping

Evie Wyld’s passion for horror shines through in the setting of this novel.

—— Chiara Rimella , Monocle

Utterly enthralling… [Wyld’s] eye for human foibles and idiosyncrasy is incredibly sharp, and this novel once again exhibits her bravura way with narrative structure… Dark, disturbing and very sophisticated.

—— William Boyd , Sunday Times

[An] intensely absorbing gothic novel, which weaves together the fate of three women across three centuries. That it can also comfortably accommodate episodes of off-the-wall, Fleabag-esque hilarity confirms the acclaimed Wyld's brilliance.

—— Stephanie Cross , Daily Mail *Best of Summer Books*

Wyld's thought-provoking plots separate this book from many others on the shelves... Wyld's three narratives are artfully crafted to suit the shifting time frames.

—— Scottish Field

Wyld's ingeniously linked narratives weave a haunting tale of fear and defiance.

—— Jane Shilling , Daily Mail

A novel of such subtlety and hope

—— Ross Raisin, author of A NATURAL , Observer, *Summer Reads of 2022*
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