Eye Marty

Completed before he died, thirty years ago, this is the autobiography of the celebrated comedian, Marty Feldman. Marty played the fool, often very happily and with tremendous talent and volcanic, anarchic energy, for his entire life. His face is what many people most immediately remember. It was a face that David Frost, one of his bosses, characterised as 'too grotesque' for television -- see what Feldman has to say about Frost, and Francis Bacon, and John Lennon...Marty himself described his face as 'the right packaging for my job...the right packaging for a clown.'Less known is the fact that Marty was a professional writer, and considered himself a writer first, and an actor second. Feldman created a number of immensely successful and influential shows, and was one of the most essential creative forces in British comedy embodied also by his close friends and creative partners from Beyond the Fringe (especially Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and Monty Python (especially John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle).Feldman finished, and set aside Eye Marty soon before travelling to Mexico to shoot his final film. He did not know that he would die there, although he certainly felt he might die soon, and was haunted by the notion. The book is exactly as Feldman wrote it, his great friend Mark Flanagan, had it transcribed, with even the photos inserted where Feldman had noted where they should go. Hilarious, deeply charming, aphoristic, ironic, charged throughout with lust for life and filled with scenes of great vanished eras and and portraits of other performers and friends, Eye Marty is the amazing discovery of the story of a man who was at the heart of the British comedy revolution.