Title: James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes
Author: James Acaster
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 308
Rating: 4/5
This collection of non-fiction comes to us from Scrapemaster General James Acaster, who joined fellow comedian Josh Widdecombe on his XFM radio show for a weekly spot where he talked about some of the awkward situations that he’d got himself into throughout his life.
The book, then, is basically the written equivalent of that weekly spot, pulling together a bunch of disparate stories like the time that he agreed to juggle as part of a performance as a kid, despite not knowing how to juggle. The results were predictably awkward.
One thing that stood out to me was the way that it was said that if he’d just stopped to think for a moment before acting, most of these scrapes wouldn’t have happened. That’s pretty relatable, because who hasn’t ended up in trouble because they acted or spoke on impulse?
Acaster is a funny guy, and his idiosyncratic sense of humour comes across in the book in exactly the same way that it does when you see him on TV. I haven’t checked out the source material, but I think it’d be interesting to see how different the book is to just being a transcript of what was said on the radio.
Given the nature of the book, I think it could also be a pretty good audio book if it was narrated by Acaster, and while I haven’t checked it out, I’m sure such a thing exists. Judging it as just a book, without the extra context of listening to the radio shows, I still think it worked well and it was lots of fun for me to read on the exercise bike. If I wasn’t a fully-fledged fan before, I am now.