Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Godfrey's Ghost, 20 Aug 2009
In "Godfrey's Ghost" Nicolas Ridley is writing as one of a handful of people who didn't think of Arnold Ridley as `Private Godfrey'. Added to that is the fact that Nicolas is his son and so is approaching the matter from a unique position and quite a different angle.
The subsidiary title is `From Father to Son' and as the prologue says, "Godfrey's Ghost is, at its heart, a book about my father, Arnold Ridley, written for my son." As his son Christopher was too young to know Arnold, Nicolas worries that sometimes "it may be difficult to distinguish the actor from the man."
It seems to me that it is also a way of Nicolas getting to know his father better. Arnold had lived the majority and more successful part of his life before Nicolas came on the scene. In this endearing, touching and very unusual book, Nicolas has searched by way of `episodes, incidents, extracts, reflections' and has woven them together to help us to discover Arnold through his background, his family and his early life, as well as showing us the Arnold that he himself knew and loved. In so doing we discover a much more realistic and rounded individual, but, I am happy to say with characteristics and qualities by which we can still easily recognise our much loved `Private Godfrey'.
I would thoroughly recommend "Godfrey's Ghost" to anyone, whether they are "Dad's Army" fans or not, as it has a depth and warmth to it that is extremely appealing and a fascinating account of relationships between fathers and sons covering four generations.
|
|
|
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A highly personal story, 4 Sep 2009
I have to confess an interest. I got to know Nick Ridley when we were at university together more than 40 years ago.
I visited his home in Highgate on journeys to and from London and clearly recall his parents. Arnold bluff, friendly, but underneath a rather shy and very private man; Althea warmly smiling with a bright twinkle in her eyes at sight of her son again.
Reading this book, I could hear and see them all again, as if it were yesterday.
It is a thoughtful and deeply personal collection of Nick's memories, interspered with exerpts from Arnold's unpublished notes for an autobiography (including recollections of his childhood and early life), set in the context of a dialogue with Nick's own son and reflections on the nature of the relationships between fathers and sons.
Parts will bring tears to your eyes.
|
|
|
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fathers, Sons and Ghosts, 7 Sep 2009
For the second time this year I have had the pleasure of reading a book written by someone I count as a friend. Knowing the author of a book, particularly when the book is very personal, adds an extra dimension because you can seek and find the person you know in the telling, and enjoy finding your perceptions nuanced and enriched. Nic Ridley's book "Godfrey's Ghost - from father to son" is a great deal more, however, than a book to be read by his friends. At one level it is a book for a single reader, his son Christopher. At another it is a book for us all. At one level it is a biography of man who made his career as a playwright and actor, but who also fought in two world wars and who saw both triumph and disaster, personally and financially. At another it is an exploration of the father-son relationship, as well as a relentless self-examination, and even a philosophical odyssey.
Nic Ridley's father was Arnold Ridley, celebrated as a young man as author of "The Ghost Train", and in his old age and in the 25 years since his death as Private Godfrey in the hugely successful series "Dad's Army". For his son Christopher, Nic wants to separate the man from the actor, and more specifically from the benign, acquiescent, bumbling, geriatric part of Godfrey, which to this day he can see on his television screen almost any week of the year. In telling his father's story, and in his quest for the true depiction of his character, Nic also turns the microscope quite ruthlessly on himself, not sparing the anger, the selfishness, or the harshness, while not obscuring his tenderness, his deep sense of loyalty towards, and love of, his family, which are also woven into his quest. This book is a fascinating construct, an engrossing story, a moving and intimate examination of family, and will be an enduring record of a man who treated "those two impostors just the same". And it is quite beautifully written. In this respect, as in so many others, the author is his father's son.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Bill Pertwee
~ Original London Cast Recording
by Roy Hudd
![It Ain't Half Hot Mum - Complete Eighth Series [1980] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lgrZF1mGL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
