Frank Skinner on the Road

Reality? Listen my friend. I'm a fifty-year-old man in a black catsuit. I've got hairy ears, I'm held together by scar tissue and, to this day, I carry a severe bladder-infection caused by one of the Venom Master's germ darts. Don't talk to me about reality. I piss reality every morning.' Thus speaks Thunderman, tired of trying to live a comic book life in a very real world. Can Geoff Phillips get him back on the mean streets where he made his glorious name, of has the hero's recently acquired, sugarcoated celebrity lifestyle un-warriored him forever? If Geoff can't resurrect his hero, who will save the nation from the Lottery-fuelled lunacy and twisted religious fervour of the Reverend Chaos and his band of surprisingly sensitive desperadoes? Thunderman and Geoff Phillips is a book about heroes and hero-worship, about beef jerky and the Bible, about the sound a head makes when it's bashed against a brick wall, about the electric beauty of dwarf girls 'Thunderman... who had the courage to tell the well-intentioned would-be liberal reformers why, sometimes you needed an iron fist in a socially conscientious glove; who championed addict help centres and literacy programmes but could still sleep easy, forty minutes after throwing a paedophile off a skyscraper.