As a boy, Michael Simkins always wanted to be someone. While his friends were out getting laid and stoned, he was tucked up at home dreaming of his name in lights, of holding an audience rapt, of perhaps becoming a TV heart-throb, or having someone, anyone, ask for his autograph in the supermarket. This is the true story of an obsessive pursuit of acting fame. It is a life marked by occasional hard-fought successes and routine helpings of ritual humiliation: scout hut Gilbert and Sullivan, dodgy rock operas, sewage farm theatre workshop, Christmas panto hell, straight-to-video film flops, leading roles in Crimewatch reconstructions and dressing up as a chicken to advertise TV dinners. It is a hilarious tale of turgid theatre, tights, trusses and tonsil tennis with Timothy Spall.

• The Rules of Acting
• Detour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education
• Fatty Batter: How cricket saved my life (then ruined it)
• The Last Flannelled Fool: My small part in English cricket's demise and its large part in mine
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Acting (But Were Afraid To Ask, Dear)