The Full English: A Sunday Times bestseller

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A popular broadcaster – many people would recognise what one reviewer terms his “Lancastrian burr”, both from his BBC Radio 6 shows and his regular TV appearances – he is also credited with coining the term Britpop.

The Full English by Stuart Maconie | Waterstones

He was acutely conscious, however, that he was just breezing through and that he reports rather than critiques what he encounters. Maconie, portraying himself a 'professional northerner', uses childhood experiences alongside anecdotes from recent visits to illuminate the book. Maconie conjures up the contemporary version of that beauty through vivid snapshots of the cities and towns as he finds them.The broadcaster, then, is one of England’s proud northerners who have thrived in the southern metropolis before finding their way back.

Stuart Maconie on oatcakes, bottle ovens and turning over Stuart Maconie on oatcakes, bottle ovens and turning over

And the 'thing' turned out to be his new book, The Full English, which sees him follow in the footsteps of JB Priestley's classic travelogue, English Journey, to 'explore our national identity and how it has evolved over the last century'.

It is the towns that seem to have fallen into the time slips that Priestley dramatised in his plays. Maconie also said he was the first to use the term Britpop for the British pop music movement of the mid-1990s. But, as Maconie Dick Whittingtons his way through England’s parishes, the reminder of empire is everywhere.

The Full English: A Sunday Times bestseller eBook : Maconie

Priestley, a Bradford boy made good with a sharp eye and a biting, sometimes snobbish turn of phrase, meandered through Albion during the autumn of that year. Stuart Maconie, presenter of BBC Radio 6’s Freak Zone and much else, knows his musical and literary onions well and has form in writing English travelogues with snappy titles ( Pies and Prejudice, Adventures on the High Teas, Never Mind the Quantocks). Maconie aims at being just that, modelling his book on English Journey, JB’s “rambling but truthful account” of England in 1933.

It’s morning time and he’s in bright form, having spent a lively evening in Newcastle at a public gathering for The Full English, his engaging new travelogue, in which he retraces the reflective journey that JB Priestley took in 1933 for his book English Journey. Why can’t we be less concerned with bossing the world and try and become a happy and content people?