Nerd Do Well [Hardcover]

Like most fans of Simon Pegg, I first discovered him and his work with the seminal sitcom "Spaced" he co-wrote and co-starred in with Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), and ever since I've been delighted to see him and the phenomenally inventive director Edgar Wright create some of the funniest and best-made films around ("Shaun Of The Dead" and "Hot Fuzz"). With this autobiography, I was eager to read the behind-the-scenes journey of how Pegg ascended from fan to creator and how these beloved shows and films got made.

Let me first say that there's much about this book that I really enjoyed. The majority of it focuses on Pegg's childhood and school career and there are some fond, well-told reminiscences of his early influences in theatre and comedy, teachers who inspired and spurred him on, and even his first faltering steps into sex and romance (including a sweetly-told anecdote of his love for a French exchange student), along with a colourful general background of growing up in Gloucester.

We also get a few mini-essays, in which Pegg goes off on a tangent to share his often insightful thoughts on, say, the cultural significance of the original "Star Wars" trilogy or the symbolic meaning behind zombies in classic horror films.

However, there's also much about this book that disappointed / frustrated me, and will probably disappoint a lot of other Pegg fans.

Firstly, the narrative is wilfully scattershot, jumping back and forth a lot, which makes it hard to keep track of when we are in Pegg's life and what happened in which year. It can also make it feel as if certain stretches of the narrative go on forever, as we keep jumping back to an event we've already read about, whilst other events are referred to obliquely out of context but never actually placed in time.

Secondly, the autobiography is interspersed with chapters of a (fake) novel that Pegg is writing. This novel is written as a parody of self-aggrandizing fan fic, in which Pegg depicts himself as a jet-setting secret agent with a robot butler; the 'poor' writing is quite funny and nicely observed, and the chapters are brief and infrequent, so this element probably wouldn't bother me if it weren't that:

Thirdly, and most frustrating, there's hardly anything about the making of "Spaced", his films or his working and personal relationships with Jessica Hynes, Edgar Wright et al. This is undoubtedly what many Pegg fans will be salivating for when buying this book and there's a crushing disappointment that comes in realising that, with only 50 pages of book left to go, this whole period of Pegg's life is just going to be skimmed over.

Ultimately, this is the autobiography that Simon Pegg wanted to write; not necessarily the one that some of his fans would want to read. What is featured in this book is interesting, well-told and often poignant; however, it's unavoidably overshadowed by what ISN'T featured, whilst the book could also have benefitted from some tighter or more straightforward structuring. Now that the hardback price has come down, well worth a try with those caveats in mind.

Over the last ten years Simon Pegg has risen from being a minor stand-up comic to one of the UK's most recognisable funny men, via the classic TV series Spaced and the movies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. He's also become a sort-of ambassador and spokesman for geek culture due to his well-known love of all things SF&F (only don't mention the Star Wars prequels in his presence).

This autobiography is an interesting read but ultimately fails to entirely satisfy. Pegg himself seems to frequently cast aspersions on the project, pointing out that most celebrity bios are rubbish and a bit pointless. Whilst Pegg has certainly had an interesting enough career to cover in a book (moving from unknown stand-up to having Spielberg, Romero, Tarantino and Peter Jackson on his mobile phone contacts list), much of this 'interesting stuff' gets short shrift. Instead, the book focuses on Pegg's childhood, teenage years and upbringing in Gloucestershire.

Pegg writes engagingly, but eschews any type of chronological structure in favour of a thematic one, although this doesn't work well. As such the book bounces around the timeline of his life fairly randomly as he recounts various childhood incidents. Some of these are very funny, but the problem Pegg has is that he had a perfectly ordinary, middle-class upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite his strong geek credentials, he wasn't really a stereotypical geek at school either. Indeed, he was exuberant, out-going and arty, and even spent a brief period bullying younger and smaller children at school (until, not entirely unsympathetically, one of his victims grew up to be much bigger than him and eventually exacted revenge). His recounting of friendships and early romantic entanglements is rather endearing, but the book only really gets interesting when we get insights into events that were clearly influential on his later acting and writing.

For example, arguably the three finest chapters in the book deal with Star Wars. The first two recount his early exposure to the trilogy and his essay on the trilogy's impact on popular culture and cinema of the period. The third analyses the prequel trilogy and where exactly George Lucas went wrong (which might feel redundant if it wasn't then illuminated by a conversation between Pegg and Lucas at the end which features Lucas's eye-popping admission that he shouldn't have been making the same movie over and over again for thirty years). These sections are great, contrasting Pegg as the young kid exposed to this huge, zeitgeist-defining shift in pop culture and as the older adult confronting a cynical marketing and toy-selling exercise. A further chapter where Pegg recollects his friendship with Nick Frost and their frequent patronage of a local pub is also brilliant, as we start seeing the genesis of Shaun of the Dead in the duo's refusal to try other hostelries. There's also some solid anecdotage here, such as the time they invited Gillian Anderson to join them for an X-Files-themed pub quizz night and knew more about the show than she did, or when they convinced Chris Martin of Coldplay to let the pub have the band's second album for the jukebox weeks before its official release.

Similar gems are sprinkled through the book, such as the time Pegg and (frequent collaborator and director) Edgar Wright won an argument with a mickey-taking Quentin Tarantino, or when Pegg donned a Batman Joker mask to traverse Comic-Con to get stuff signed without being stopped by Shaun of the Dead fans, but the good stuff is few and far between. Pegg, somewhat bafflingly, says that he can't get into the nuts and bolts of his professional career without risking offending anyone. As a result, we get only a small amount of writing about Shaun of the Dead, a little on Spaced and his new movie, Paul, and virtually nothing on Hot Fuzz. Given that the latter film was much-inspired by Pegg and Wright's Gloucestershire upbringing and could have been thematically linked to the earlier formative recollections, this feels like a missed opportunity.

Every few chapters Pegg drops in a chapter from a non-existent novel in which Simon Pegg, international agent provocateur, the best-dressed man in Europe and lover extraordinaire, battles the machinations of an evil enemy with the assistance of his robot butler and bodyguard Canterbury (absolutely not based on Threepio from Star Wars, apparently) whilst being frustrated by his inability to quote from The Shawshank Redemption correctly. These sections are amusing, but thankfully brief, given their reliance on the same few jokes.

Nerd Do Well (***) is readable and somewhat entertaining, but also disappointing: the author doesn't really talk about the things that made him famous and his life story is pretty straightforward with no major drama to recount. As such it's a fun but disposable read crying out for a much more in-depth sequel. The book is available now in the UK and in June 2011 in the USA.

having always been quite a fan of spaced, shaun and the like, i was quite excited to pick up simon pegg's biography, but its very insubstantial. i thought the first warning sign was when he mentioned he a, was very private and didnt like talking about himself, and b, he didnt have a burning desire to write a autobiography, it was more that the publisher offered.

a great deal (maybe 80-90%) of the book is based on his childhood, and uni years, and only a very slender amount towards the end actually covers the tv shows and movies that most people would be reading this book for. it just seems very sparse, yet padded.

i didnt hate it, it was funny, but i wasnt racing to pick it up either.