Name: Christopher Matthew
Field: Journalist
Productions:
An Audience With Christopher Matthew
After Dinner Speaker
Biography:
After Oxford, Christopher Matthew taught for a year in a girls finishing school in Switzerland before becoming a copywriter in various London advertising agencies.
He took up full-time writing in 1970. As a journalist, he has been property columnist for Punch, restaurant critic for Vogue, radio critic for the Sunday Telegraph, a book and television reviewer for the Daily Mail, and a travel correspondent for The Sunday Times.
He is the author of sixteen books. The hapless exploits of his comic creation, Simon Crisp, were recorded in five volumes of diaries, from Diary of a Somebody to Knocking On, and won a big audience on BBC Radio 4. With Benny Green, he compiled an annotated edition of Jerome K. Jeromes Three Men in a Boat, and with Benny, Tim Rice and Tims dog, Bonzo, recreated the classic journey in a BBC1 film.
His novel about a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, The Long-Haired Boy, was adaped by ITV in a six-part series, starring Nigel Havers, James Fox and Joanna Lumley.
Havers also starred, with Keith Barron, in a series he part-wrote, called The Good Guys.
Christopher has written plays and short stories for Radio 4 and appeared in numerous programmes, including Quote, Unquote, and is to be heard in September, going off in all directions with Alan Coren in the fourth series of Freedom Pass.
He is probably best known as the author of Now We Are Sixty – his reworking of A.A.Milnes poems for 60-year-olds – and its sequel, Now We Are Sixty (and a Bit).
In Summoned by Balls, he turned his eye to golf and golfers in verses based on poems by the likes of Betjeman, Kipling, Tennyson and Browning.
Like P.G.Wodehouse, he believes that golf is merely a metaphor for life – a fact with which even his most determinedly non-golfing readers are prepared to agree.
Also, When We Were Fifty – another collection of verses inspired by A.A.Milne. Mostly comic, some subversive, some touching, they should hit the spot for those who have reached their half centuries, or soon will, or can remember what it was like when they did.