BACK TO

by Peter Bradshaw

THE FIRST time I met the increasingly legendary Toby Young, he had just invited me to contribute to his publication, The Modern Review - the Nineties magazine, now defunct, with the funkily brainiac approach to pop culture.

We had agreed to meet at Kensington Place restaurant in Notting Hill Gate. I was waiting for him, diffidently, at the bar, when I felt something hit me from behind with the force of Bruce Lee with fists outstretched, strapped to the front of a runaway express train. It was Toby, slapping me on the back.

"PETER! Let's EAT! I mean, you're PAYING aren't you?"

We were joined at the table by his friend, journalist Cosmo Landesman, to whom I admiringly remarked, when Toby briefly absented himself, on his animated high spirits. This elicited a strange unreadable smile from Cosmo.

Toby was to need those high spirits in the years that followed. He crashed and burned in the New York magazine world, but turned the experience into a funny and unexpectedly moving memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Now he has written the follow-up, about his subsequent catastrophic attempts to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Young tells the horrendous story of how he was wooed by one of Tinseltown's biggest moguls on the strength of his hit book; this man offered to fly Young to meetings in a private jet and give him his own office on the studio lot.

About a year later, the author finds himself cowering inside a locked car outside the Ivy restaurant in LA, while this same mogul pounds on the roof, screaming: "You're fing dead! Do you hear me?

Dead!" Only Toby Young could have failed so spectacularly, and then turned the experience into such a funny and addictively readable story.

Young will always bounce back. At the Modern Review, we all thought movies, music and trendy contemporary fiction was where it was at - and that theatre was dullsville. Now Young is The Spectator's theatre critic, and there's a heartfelt, even passionate moment in this book, where the author praises Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: "I was struck dumb by Ibsen's artistry."

Was it Henrik Ibsen, I wonder, who inspired the stage-plays that Toby has written: Who's the Daddy? and A Right Royal Farce?

The book is a tribute, of sorts, to the author's formidable wife Caroline, whose good sense has kept him on the straight and narrow. There is a lot of sweetly uxorious stuff about the birth of his two children, during which I was thinking: mmm, yes, nice - now can we get back to the bit where you have the embarrassing encounter with Gordon Brown in the Washington men's room?

Young's friend, screenwriter Rob Long, talks about the phenomenon of "failing up": doing badly yet somehow accumulating career-prestige in the process. No one fails up as stratospherically as Toby Young.

The Evening Standard, Sept 11, 2006