The heroine of this book is beautiful blonde Barbara Parker, who turns down the crown of Miss Blackpool to escape to London.
Barbara has a passion for US comedienne Lucille Ball and is determined to become a comic too.
In London, she finds an agent and is introduced to two script writers, barely concealed shades of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
She is renamed Sophie Straw, and her TV series is a great success.
But the book is about more than Sophie.
It is about Britain in the post-war 1950s, about stuffy attitudes in the BBC, where the pipe-smoking, bearded Oxbridge cognoscenti are dismayed by the popularity of the emerging taste for tasteless light entertainment.
The scriptwriting scenes are fascinating as a picture of creativity in action, and personal issues intervene all the time.
Inevitably, the series is superseded by new writers and comics as tastes change, but Sophie manages to keep a place in British comedy, as this story will among readers of Nick Hornby's books.
• Margaret Bannister is a retired Dunedin psychotherapist and science teacher.
