City Lights and Streets Ahead

Keith Waterhouse thought his first book of memoirs, City Lights, was the best book he ever wrote. Here he recalls his childhood and adolescence in soot-blackened, tramcar-rattling Leeds, and describes with his customary wit, warmth and eye for detail the earliest events that shaped him as a writer. A magical, touching book that is also an elegy to England’s past, City Lights is a delightful evocation of childhood and youth and perhaps the most important chapter in Waterhouse’s lifelong love affair with cities. Streets Ahead Streets Ahead takes up where City Lights left off. Keith Waterhouse has achieved his ambition and, in 1952, arrives in Fleet Street. These were the days of long liquid lunches, of eccentric and inspired newspapermen and of foreign assignments. It was also when British New Wave writing took off with such works as his own second novel Billy Liar. In 1959 Waterhouse teamed up with Willis Hall to write the stage play of Billy Liar. This was the start of a prolific partnership that produced dozens of scripts for television, stage and screen. Waterhouse tells of Hollywood days with Hitchcock and Disney and Hollywood nights with the Rolling Stones.Waterhouse records his departure, with the arrival of Cap’n Bob Maxwell, from the Daily Mirror, the decline of Fleet Street and his own successful adventures as a solo playwright with director Ned Sherrin. Streets Ahead is a lyrical and very funny memoir of an eventful, euphoric era.