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‘Gill is a wit and a charmer. Even when he’s wrong, he’s superbly full of himself’ – Lynn Barber
‘One of the finest writers of our time’ – Andrew Neil
‘A shining intellectual with a remarkable wit. There will never be anyone like him’ – Joan Collins
‘He never once produced a boring sentence or a phrase that did not shine’ – John Witherow
‘A true master of the bon mot’ – Sam Leith
‘A golden writer’ – Andrew Marr
‘His text danced across the page, there was sheer delight, music even, in the way he wrote’ – William Sitwell
‘AA Gill was one of the last great stylists of modern journalism and one of the very few who could write a column so full of gags and original similes that it was actually worth reading twice’ – Boris Johnson
‘I never met AA Gill, and cursed his name often – but he was funny, clever, honest, and wrote terrific sentences’ – Hugh Laurie
‘A giant among journalists’ – Martin Ivens
Also by AA Gill
Non-Fiction
AA Gill Is Away
The Angry Island
Previous Convictions
Breakfast at the Wolseley
Table Talk
Paper View
Here and There
AA Gill is Further Away
The Golden Door
Pour Me
Lines in the Sand
Fiction
Sap Rising
Starcrossed
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © AA Gill, 2017
Uncle Dysfunctional columns originally published in British Esquire
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 183 9
eISBN 978 1 78689 184 6
Typeset in Baskerville and Sentinel by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Contents
Introduction by Alex Bilmes
He wasn’t a cuddly uncle. His wasn’t a reassuring arm around a heaving shoulder, a fond pinch of a tear-stained cheek. There was no coin mysteriously conjured from behind your ear, to be spent on an illicit bag of sweets. He wasn’t indulgent. There was no soft touch. He wouldn’t tolerate selfishness, or showing off, or self-regard, the musty stink of complacent, old-style masculinity. He was as likely to sneer and scorn as smile and sympathise. You didn’t come to him for affirmation, or absolution. You came to be challenged, to have your preconceptions overturned, your follies exposed. You came when you were desperate, and you got what you deserved: strong medicine, in dangerous doses. The effect was immediate. The effect was sobering. The effect was magic.
Yes, he had a filthy tongue and a dirty mind. Your mother might not approve. (For God’s sake, don’t give this book to your mother.) But he could be empathetic, and compassionate too. He was AA Gill and he wasn’t: he was Uncle Dysfunctional, Adrian’s id unleashed. He was a performance, an act of outrageous ventriloquism, an uproarious work of fiction that was also true. He was always deadly serious, and he was never not taking the piss.
Uncle Dysfunctional was my idea, Adrian Gill my first marquee signing when, by what he seldom failed to remind me must have been some cosmic clerical error, I was appointed editor of British Esquire at the end of 2010. By then, we’d worked together for close to a decade and during that time he had become more than a colleague. He was a friend, and he was a mentor. He was older than me. He’d seen more, done more, lived more, and thought harder and longer than me about what it means to be a man in the world, about what it means to be a father, a son, a lover, a brother, a friend. He advised me, he admonished me, he educated me, and he made me laugh.
And I thought that that was what he should do for the readers of Esquire, what he should be for them (and now you) too: a rogue relation, cleverer and braver, wiser and worldlier than us, also madder, and much more difficult. And funnier. Before anything else, he was funny.
Adrian went for it straight away. He loved the silly name. Even over the phone, as I proposed the idea to him, I fancied I could see the gleam in his eye. For those who have somehow never encountered his work before – really? – Adrian was, until his death in December 2016, at the age of sixty-two, perhaps the most famous newspaper writer in Britain, the hypodermic-sharp critic and feature writer for the Sunday Times, celebrated for his merciless skewerings of second-rate restaurants and his joyful demolitions of terrible TV shows, as well as for his kaleidoscopic travel writing and his unflinching dispatches from some of the world’s most benighted places. Simply put, he was one of Fleet Street’s all-time greats, inimitable, with a voice and a style and a persona utterly his own.
I knew, because of all this, that Unc, as Adrian called him, would be witty and waspish. I knew he would be honest and uncompromising. I knew he would make you snort, make you guffaw, make you wince, make you throw your hands up, make you think. But I had no idea where Adrian would go with him, or how far. Much farther than I could have imagined, at times much farther than I would have wished, and then farther still. In a little under six years he wrote close to sixty Esquire columns and, believe me, he had no intention of stopping. By the end they were mini surrealist masterpieces, gob-stoppingly weird. His final column – though none of us knew it would be, including him – purported to be a fantastically (or perhaps authentically) misogynist diatribe from Donald Trump. It was, as so often, a virtuoso display.
Adrian was tickled by Esquire readers’ responses to the Unc columns. “It’s the one thing that people come up to me in the street about,” he once said. “They don’t come up and talk to me about food and television, or African politics. But they will ask me about Esquire. The thing that everybody says is, ‘Are the questions real?’ And they are real. The fact they’re written by me doesn’t make them unreal. I always say, ‘Yes, they are. Trust me: I’m Uncle Dysfunctional.’”
He was chuffed that we – me, the staff of the magazine, our readers – found the scatological gags and the flamboyant swearing funny. But Uncle Dysfunctional offered more than pungent puerility and phantasmagoric flights of fancy. There was profundity, too, and serious points were made – about sex and sexuality, men and women and other men and other women, parents and children, work and play, ethics and immorality. But, as you are about to discover, he never let more important concerns get in the way of a good knob joke.
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