Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing Life Death and the Thrill of the Catch by Bob Mortimer Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing: The perfect gift for this Christmas. Join these two comedy greats and lifelong friends on their journey from recuperation to riverbank in this hilarious and heart-warming audiobook that gives you a front-row seat at an exclusive Bob and Paul production. Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have been friends for 30 years, but when life intervened, what was once a joyous and spontaneous friendship dwindled to the odd phone call or occasional catch up. Then, Glory Be! They were both diagnosed with heart disease and realised that time is short. They'd better spend it fishing . So they dusted off their kits, chucked on their waders and ventured into the achingly beautiful British countryside to fish, rediscover the joys of their friendship and ruminate on some of life's most profound questions, such as: How did we get so old? Where are all the fish? What are your favourite pocket meats? What should we do if we find a corpse? Following the success of the BBC's Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing series, this wonderful audiobook by two lifelong friends is a love letter to the joys of angling, the thrill of the catch and the virtue of having a right daft laff with your mates. On the fish, the equipment, the food, and the locations, Gone Fishing is the perfect audiobook for fans of Bob Mortimer, Paul Whitehouse and for anyone who wants to listen to a brilliantly written and endlessly funny joint memoir on life, friendship and joys of fishing. What I Think About When I Think About Reading. Essays about books and the thoughts I have reading them. Subscribe to Blog via Email. Pages. Blogroll. Archives. What I Think About When I Think About Reading. Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch. Book 10 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge. Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing is a companion book to the BBC series of the same name. You don’t need to have watched it to enjoy the book (although I hope you do watch it, it’s quite the antidote to much of the rubbish on the box). Nor do you need to be an angler or interested in fishing. You don’t even particularly need to be a fan of either Bob Mortimer or Paul Whitehouse. The book is more than the sum of its parts. I love Bob Mortimer. I’ve loved him since I first watched Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out as a student. Vic would be prancing around, being the star, and Bob would interject pure silliness with no fandango. “Vic, I’ve fallen.” was the funniest thing I had ever seen. The mimsiness of Graham Lister, the weirdly aggressive feyness of Wavey Davey, the cry of “You wouldn’t let it lie!”, all chimed with the silliness in my brain. I’m not an angler. I feel no joy thinking about a baited hook ripping into the flesh of a fish’s mouth or about a fish being pulled gasping from the water as some sort of trophy. Even with the modern practice of catch and release, it’s the thought of the stress a poor creature that’s only trying to live its best life endures when it’s hooked and reeled in that turns me off from fishing. So much so that I only watched Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing because I love Bob so much. Unexpectedly, the programme captured me, because of Paul Whitehouse’s love for the water, the fish, the slowing down of life, and because of Bob Mortimer’s giddiness about the act of catching fish. The programme is about friendship. It’s about taking time out from the frenzy of work, whatever your work might be, and getting back to nature. It’s a travelogue that celebrates British nature, and that explores craftsmanship and quirkiness. It’s a nature programme that showcases the variety and beauty of British fish. I still find the catching and examining of the fish brutal, and wish that they could be left to swim in peace, but then there wouldn’t be the beautiful programme to watch. I’m talking a lot about TV here. What of the book? It’s inspired by the programme, rather than a version of it on paper. In it, Bob and Paul go into more detail about their friendship of over thirty years and the health issues they have had more recently. There’s a lot of kindness and love in these pages, and it is, of course, very funny. It expands on things from the first two series of Gone Fishing . There’s something different about reading Bob and Paul’s words on the page, hearing their voices in those words, but not being distracted by their facial expressions and gestures that sometimes, on the tv show, draw your attention from what is being said. Through Bob’s view of Paul and his friendship with him, I gained a greater appreciation of him. I know him best from The Fast Show and his work with Harry Enfield. I like him, I think he’s funny and clever in his humour, but watching him on TV I also sensed a sharp edge to him that meant I never loved him. I read an article about Adam Buxton recently, in which his former comedy partner Joe Cornish said something that made sense of why I often shy away from one person in a double act. Cornish, like Paul Whitehouse, had an edge to him that, for me, often crossed a line and was unnecessarily mean to Adam. In the article, he says this: I think I was probably looking for the most provocative answer. My brain issues the true standard answer and then thinks, well, that’s a bit boring, what would be more interesting? That search for the more interesting thing to say is what I sense about Paul Whitehouse. In comparison, Bob Mortimer (and Adam Buxton) seems to be less filtered, his instinct more on the side of silliness than whether he is doing the clever thing. Bob’s comedy is clever, but it’s daft clever. Paul says as much in the book. He pretends not to be clever, but he’s a very clever boy, Mortimer. Much cleverer than he lets on. … whenever we talk about comedy, Bob always says, ‘Paul have you noticed how people these days want to do their routine and want to be remembered as being clever? What’s wrong with just being daft ?’ One of the cleverest things – and Bob won’t thank me for saying it’s clever – is, ‘Oh, Vic … I’ve fallen.’ Who else would think of that? Nobody .” I enjoyed getting to know Paul better through his reminiscences of childhood fishing, out with his dad around the River Lea, near Enfield where the family moved when Paul was five years old, and in the Rivers Usk and Wye when they went back to the Rhondda to visit family. These youthful adventures, being close to his dad, awoke in Paul a love of the beauty of Britain and its wildlife. Bob’s chapter about the act of going fishing, of returning to something last done as a teenager, draws strongly on how the landscape is important to him, and how it’s the activity rather than the success that makes for a good day. Bob seeks to lose himself in the moment in a way that reminded me of when I used to go out for a photography trip. The planning of where to go, what I might see, whether the light would be good, what sort of photographs I might end up capturing has echoes in how Bob prepares for and thinks about a fishing trip. And then being there, and being alive to the moment, all expectation gone. Bob says something interesting in regard to being seriously ill, about considering the limited time we actually have on the planet and how we ought to slow down and enjoy the small moments. I used to look at my mother-in-law when she came round and she’d stare at birds. Wouldn’t say owt but she’d stare at the birds. It was boring for us – we’d be trying to watch the football and she’d say, ‘Oh, look at the birds on that tree ‘ And thinking you might die, you get a little window into that mindset. Being able to be alive and watch a magpie is incredible, and you ignore it. So I got a little insight – I understood exactly where she was at that point in her life. She didn’t have long left at that time, and when something like this happens, you realise you have to drink from it while you can. Not that I think I’m going to die soon, but this made sense to me in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic. This sense that there’s something microscopically small out there that could steal your life from you at whatever age, and the sudden restrictions on living the life you had been living that we still don’t know whether they’re temporary or not, have certainly focused my mind on what’s important. I used to get ridiculously anxious about work. I still do, when my head has resubmerged itself in work mode, but over the last five months, I’ve grown better at turning away from my manufactured stress and looking out of the back bedroom window, where my laptop is set up, to stare at the trees in the RAC carpark and think about nothing.