Robert Webb working on childhood memoir

Robert Webb is writing a memoir based on his boyhood and adolescence – as well as working on a new sitcom with David Mitchell.

He tweeted this morning: 'Thought exercise while writing The Book: how would I explain this version of masculinity to [BBC Breakfast host] Bill Turnball? (assuming they'll have me on)'.

Echoing Caitlin Moran's bestseller How To Build A Girl, Webb previously revealed on Mel and Sue's daytime ITV show that the autobiographical account is 'a gender-based memoir about how to be a boy', adding that it would elaborate on aspects of a column he'd written for the New Statesman in October, entitled How Not To Be A Boy.

In the column, in which Webb recalls moving in with his divorced father after his mother died when he was 17, he remembers how he shifted from traditional conceptions of masculinity in childhood, 'an orgy of make-believe violence… in a working-class household in Lincolnshire', to experimenting with poetry, comedy and his sexuality as a teenager, defining this 'slightly misfiring impulse' as 'come and call me a poof if you think you're hard enough'.

Ultimately arriving at a fonder appreciation of his father and the difficult relationship they had, he concluded: ‘Nobody ever told me: you don’t have to waste years trying to figure out how to be a “man” because the whole concept is horseshit.

‘We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons. The whole thing is – at best – just a stupefying waste of everyone’s time.’

Currently touring the UK as Bertie Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, Webb has also revealed that he and his double-act partner Mitchell are planning a return to Radio 4 with their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and a TV sitcom for the pair of them to star in, written with The Thick of It, Veep and Peep Show writer Simon Blackwell.
 The project was 'very early days on the boil' he told Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie on their BBC 6 Radio show last month, while confirming that the final series of Peep Show would shoot this summer, to air at Christmas.

Mitchell had previously told Cambridge University newspaper Varsity that the new sitcom wouldn’t air until 2016 ‘at the earliest'.


-by Jay Richardson

Published: 6 Mar 2015