By my estimate, somewhere around 1.5 per cent of the books published in Britain every year will be reviewed in these pages. Figures published in the Guardian earlier this week showed a total of 141,000 titles published annually by UK publishers. Not all of these will be new titles; the figures include old titles in new formats. Not all of the new titles will be reviewable in pages of general interest; some will be scientific monographs, others devoted to changes in the VAT rules. But even when you weed these out, there is still a formidable rump of what you might call generally interesting new books, only a fraction of which will get any kind of attention in the literary pages of even the most serious newspaper. Last week, this section noticed 35 of them. However good or bad or long or short the review, the authors of these books should feel privileged that the warm little lamp of attention has swung their way.
In this desperate situation, I feel it the occasional duty of this column to notice books that would otherwise still stand shivering outside in the dark. This week's book is A Likely Story: the Autobiography of Rodney Bewes.
When it arrived on my desk, I let out a disbelieving yelp. Rodney Bewes is the actor who played Bob in The Likely Lads, the 1960s BBC comedy series that returned in the 1970s as Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads? There was Bob and there was Terry, played by James Bolam. Terry/Bolam was the thin-faced malcontent while Bob/Bewes was the chubby and more aspirational one, by the 1970s often in a wide-lapelled suit. They were approximately working-class and they lived approximately in the north-east of England, where they had difficulties with girls and the idea of "settling down", which is what girls wanted in those days. It was tremendously popular and, with a script by Ian la Frenais and Dick Clement, sometimes very funny. In 1965, the last episode of the first series was watched in 10 million homes.
It would be fair to say, however, that a part in a long-ago television comedy is the only reason most people have ever heard of Bewes, outside the small theatrical audiences for his touring, one-man version of Three Men in a Boat (the 1980s were not at all kind to him). That accounted for my disbelieving yelp. Who would buy such a book for £17.99 (Century)? What's the market for it? My wife said, "Look, I grew up in Newcastle, I loved The Likely Lads, but even if you tied me down to a chair and propped open my eyelids with matchsticks I would never read the autobiography of Rodney Bewes."
Still, I began to read it. Bewes doesn't write very well, and sometimes not coherently (chronology is a problem), but the tone is conversational and the form episodic, and there are one or two good theatrical anecdotes. Bewes was born in 1937 in Morley, West Yorkshire, the sickly (asthmatic) second son of a minor local government functionary. He dropped out of Rada. He washed dishes in hotels. He was lucky, probably, to have a northern accent when they were first in cinematic demand, and landed the part of Tom Courtenay's pal in the film Billy Liar. He and Courtenay became good friends - there are some nice sketches of Courtenay's grand shyness - and, with their brides and Courtenay's new in-laws, spent their honeymoons together in Morocco. Quite soon after, Courtenay's marriage ended and he came to live with the Beweses. Here, and in other places, there comes the feeling of a story not completely told.
A few facts and one or two phrases are memorable. The fact that The Likely Lads originated in a sketch that La Frenais and Clement wrote for an amateur theatrical group of BBC staffers. Or that Albert Finney grew suddenly rich because he was on a percentage of Tony Richardson's hugely successful Tom Jones, a film that when he was making it he imagined to be nothing more than "Richardson wanking through Dorset". Or that Bewes became a member of the Garrick, where he held an 80th birthday party for his mum.
Of course, the crucial part of his story is his relationship with James Bolam, who is quite well-known to be "difficult", mainly because he hated the intrusion of the public and the press. When fans of the series called out to him in the street, "Where's Bob then, Terry?", Bolam would reply that he was dead ("They don't ask for your autograph, nothing, end of conversation"). Bewes did the publicity, and was happy to talk his head off - one of them had to - and that (according to Bewes) is why Bolam hasn't spoken to him in 30 years.
The incident in question is both trivial and complicated in Bewes's version of it. His wife had given birth to triplets. He told the Bolams the news. Some time later, while Bolam was driving with his wife, she told him of her own pregnancy: "Er, you know Daphne's had three, well I'm just having the one!" Bolam nearly crashed the car, and when he told Bewes the story the two men "laughed and laughed". The laughter stopped when Bewes rang Bolam to warn him the story was in a newspaper. That was that.
Another person Bewes hasn't spoken to in a long time is his brother Geoffrey, though this time it is Bewes who has maintained the angry silence. In early 1990, their mother lay dying in a hospice in Lancashire. Bewes went up to see her for the last time: "I wanted her to see me in a suit and Garrick Club tie." Her northern funeral coincided with the opening night of a play in Brighton that Bewes was in. He did not attend the funeral. His brother sold the story to the News of the World: "Likely lad too busy for mum's funeral". And that again was that.
I finished the book around midnight, wondering with which of these Likely Lads it would be the most pleasure to be on non-speakers. My jury is still out.
· Ian Jack is the editor of Granta