Michel Aspel: My six best books

MICHAEL ASPEL, 76, has presented TV shows such as Crackerjack, This Is Your Life and Antiques Roadshow in a showbiz career that has spanned nearly 50 years.

Michael Aspel reveals his favourite books Michael Aspel reveals his favourite books

Michel Aspel is playing Baron Hardup in the First Family Entertainment production of Cinderella at Woking Theatre from December 4-10. Tickets are available via the website www.firstfamilyentertainment.co.uk

FIFTY AMAZING HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES

by Nicholas Van Rijn

Out of print

As a child I was evacuated to the countryside and one of the books I found on the bookshelf where I was staying was this volume of boys’ stories. It’s real boys’ own stuff but it helped take me to all sorts of exciting places in my head and survive the war.

RUPERT ANNUAL, 2010 

I grew up with Rupert the Bear and loved both the drawings and the characters, including Rupert and his pal Edward Trunk. Reading the picture captions undoubtedly helped get me into reading, the start of a lifelong passion for books.

LADY - DON'T TURN OVER

by Darcy Glinto

Out of print

Some of my fellow conscripts during my National Service days couldn’t read so I would read this classic postwar British gangster story by Darcy Glinto out loud to them in the barracks at night. Regardless of whether or not it’s great literature, it’s a terrific story.

THE KIDS STAYS IN THE PICTURE

by Robert Evans

Out of print

A brilliant Hollywood memoir by the one-time pretty boy turned seven-times married Hollywood producer, which charts his relationship with the actress Ali McGraw and his drug habit among other things in an action-packed life. It was later made into a movie but the book is even better.

THE SMOKING DIARIES

by Simon Gray

Granta, £7.99

I’ve been working my way through the late playwright’s Smoking Diaries and they’re a wonderful read. Despite his fondness for alcohol and tobacco, you just can’t help warming to his irascibility as in due course he faces up to having terminal cancer in this darkly comic memoir.

BLOOD MERIDIAN

by Cormac McCarthy

Out of print

Ostensibly about the Old West, this tells the story of a teenage runaway who joins a gang of scalp hunters killing Indians on the US-Mexico border in the mid-19th century. The best book I’ve read in years. It’s magnificently written.

Would you like to receive news notifications from Daily Express?