My small part in English cricket's demise and its large part in mine

The Last Flannelled Fool

A hilarious odyssey in search of some answers about life and cricket from the author of the bestselling Fatty Batter

One of those rambling, picaresque, unashamedly nostalgic travel books that so enliven a summer afternoon... funny, crafty and written with extraordinary verve

A funny, well-observed obituary of English cricket's eccentric soul

Simkins is a lively conversationalist, full of the jokes, anecdotes and wisdom from many years' matches

Michael Simkins is the ultimate Sunday cricketer - passionate, obsessive, technically inept, and hopelessly deluded. When an injury rules him out of an entire season, not only might it spell the end of his long career, he is faced more immediately with a summer aimlessly wandering garden centres and listening to The Archers. 
 
He decides instead to set off on an odyssey across the counties of England in search of that golden time in his youth when his passion for the game was first kindled. It's a journey that begins in May in light drizzle at the birthplace of cricket, takes in the burial site of his favourite ground (now a Marks &amp; Spencer) and even stops along the way to flirt with the love child of WG Grace and Kerry Katona that is Twenty20. It ends with the ultimate cricketing zenith - returning to the field of play to bowl an over to Freddie Flintoff in fading light in front of a capacity crowd. So can cricket still bring comfort and meaning to his life or is Old Father Time about to call for Michael's bails?

An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education

Detour de France

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Fatty Batter and The Last Flanelled Fool comes this hilarious tale of a Brit abroad.

Brimming with well-told anecdotes with perfectly delivered punchlines...a must-read for anyone stepping on the Eurostar

Insightful, charming and trouser-wipingly funny.

Simkins makes even the worst travel experience pleasurable.  In fact, the worse it is, the better he gets.

It's impossible to resist a book that makes you laugh aloud twice within the space of the first 5 paragraphs

Michael Simkins trained at RADA. He has appeared in more than 70 plays, stage highlights include A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre as well as musicals Chicago and Mamma Mia. He also directed Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the Greenwich Theatre. He has made countless TV appearances - recent credits include Foyle's War and My Family - as well as turns on the silver screen in such films as Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. He has worked with luminaries as diverse as Anthony Perkins, John Malkovich, Michael Gambon and Buster Merryfield. He lives with his actress wife Julia in London.

Though happy enough with his lot, Michael Simkins has never truly shaken the nagging doubt - helpfully upheld by his partner Julia - that he somehow lacks worldly sophistication. While she spent her teenage years as a nanny on a boat moored at Cannes, his utter lack of travel experience (Weymouth, Cleethorpes and a day trip to Dieppe) still has the power to shock people into leaving dinner parties early. 
 
So as he hits middle-age, Michael takes up the challenge of broadening his horizons. He decides to improve himself in the same way English gentlemen lacking refined edges have for centuries: by learning from our more cultured French neighbours. Michael, an English provincial ingénue, sets off to discover just what the Gallic nation can teach him and the rest of us Anglo-Saxons about living the good life. Armed only with 50 Useful Phrases in French, he waits to see if his odyssey from La Manche to the Riviera will finally turn him from the scotch-egg eating spawn of Anne Widdecombe and John McCririck into the champagne-sipping love child of Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Julia is saying a prayer for him at Lourdes.

How cricket saved my life (then ruined it)

Fatty Batter

The hilarious tale of one podgy boy's dreams on the outside edge of a cricketing life from 'one of Britain's funniest writers' (Daily Mail)

Once you've read this account of one man's love affair with cricket, you'll never want to read another ghosted autobiography by a Pietersen or a Vaughan again - incompetence and failure is far more fun

The childhood recollections, suffused with warmth and spangled with pain and humour, are the book's unique selling point. Lovely stuff

Simmo may be a shockingly average amateur cricketer, but when it comes to self- deprecating wit and telling a good anecdote, he's as sprightly as Garry Sobers in his prime ... anecdotes and quirky characters hurtle down at us like yorkers bowled by a fast bowler that I'm not quite knowledgeable enough to name ... an entertaining read indeed

Michael writes about disaster, humiliation, rejection and ridicule - the hilarious truth

It is wonderfully written - full of wit, gags, self-deprecating asides and a pure, unfettered understanding of a man's limitations - and it talks to all of us. You should buy it. You really should go out straight away and pick up a copy. It'll make you feel so much better

At last the work of genius that will finally bring the long-suffering cricket addict a measure of understanding in the world. A wonderful and very funny book

You read the wonderful Michael Simkins with a mixture of horror and delight

Extremely funny - whether or not you know your bails from your balls

One of the funniest sporting memoirs ever

Michael Simkins was born in 1957 and spent his childhood in a sweetshop in Brighton. In 1966 he saw his first cricket match on the TV, and from that moment he was hooked. 
When he hasn't been playing, watching or dreaming about cricket, Michael has spent his time acting. He has appeared in countless plays and musicals in the west end, most recently as Billy Flynn in Chicago, and also features regularly on TV and the silver screen, usually playing unsuspecting husbands, police sergeants or experts. He lives with his wife, the actress Julia Deakin, in north-west London, and still plays cricket to a worryingly low standard all over the Southern Counties.

A fat boy with a passion for sweets and a loathing for games, the young Michael Simkins finds in cricket a sport where size doesn't necessarily matter and a full-blown obsession is born. Now in middle-age, he still harbours the somewhat deluded belief that the England middle-order might usefully benefit from his hard-earned skills. From impromptu Test series played with his dad in the family sweetshop through to his years running a team of dysfunctional inadequates, Fatty Batter is the bestselling and hilarious story of one man's life lived through cricket.

What's My Motivation?

One actor's search for love, happiness and adulation, rewarded with rejection, ridicule, bad costumes and worse scripts

Funny, engaging, perceptive and hugely entertaining

Screamingly funny - set to become a classic

A real page-turner and a genuinely funny and honest book about the actor's life

Casts an objective eye on the crazy world of the actor with an accuracy that is both chilling and charming

Daring, brutal, hilariously candid, Simkins unravels his own profession to show the exhilaration, masochism and madness underneath

You read the wonderful Michael Simkins with a mixture of horror and delight ... will hold good for as long as people go on taking the undignified risk of dressing up and pretending to be other people

Blisteringly funny, self-deprecating account of the ritual humiliations actors undergo

A winningly self-deprecating account...packed with anecdotes, light-hearted in tone and entertaining throughout

Michael Simkins trained at RADA. He has appeared in more than 70 plays in rep, and stage highlights include A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre, as well as musicals Chicago and Mamma Mia. He also directed Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the Greenwich Theatre. He has made countless TV appearances - recent credits include Foyle's War and My Family - as well as turns on the silver screen in such films as Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. He has worked with luminaries as diverse as Anthony Perkins, John Malkovich, Michael Gambon and Buster Merryfield. He lives in London with his actress wife Julia.

As a boy, Michael Simkins always wanted to be someone. While his friends were out getting laid and stoned, he was tucked up at home dreaming of his name in lights, of holding an audience rapt, of perhaps becoming a TV heart-throb, or having someone, anyone, ask for his autograph in the supermarket. This is the true story of an obsessive pursuit of acting fame. It is a life marked by occasional hard-fought successes and routine helpings of ritual humiliation: scout hut Gilbert and Sullivan, dodgy rock operas, sewage farm theatre workshop, Christmas panto hell, straight-to-video film flops, leading roles in Crimewatch reconstructions and dressing up as a chicken to advertise TV dinners. It is a hilarious tale of turgid theatre, tights, trusses and tonsil tennis with Timothy Spall.

Michael Simkins

Readers at large will be rewarded with self-helpless laughter, generated by the absurdity and the blessedness of the job Simkins loves

As well as being an all-round actor, Simkins is a wonderfully knockabout writer, somehow managing to be world weary and full of joie de vivre at one and the same time

Hilarious ... a masterclass in the perils of being a luvvie

Readers at large will be rewarded with self-helpless laughter, generated by the absurdity and blessedness of the job Simkins loves

Luvvies. Tyrannical directors. Useless agents. Less job security than an England football manager. Who’d be an actor? 
 
Michael Simkins isn’t sure, even though he’s been one himself for over thirty years. Join him backstage as he examines that business called showbusiness, from am dram to Hollywood, and from Shakespeare to ads for flatulence pills. 
 
In a career that started as a plump teenager in ballet tights at RADA, Michael has appeared in countless West End plays and musicals, presented safety training workshops for sewage workers, and when resting, worked as a crate smasher at a car factory. He’s done movies, soaps, ads, and voice-overs, and worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Kelly Osbourne. As the ultimate jobbing actor he’s flirted with triumph and oblivion without ever quite managing either. 
 
InThe Rules of Acting he shares his hard-won wisdom. Covering everything from learning your lines to tilting for Oscar success in Hollywood, surviving a flop, to why it’s advisable to read the whole script if you wish to avoid improper relations with a pig, it’s the ultimate survival guide for anyone contemplating a life in showbiz. 
 
'Throw out An Actor Prepares! Michael Simkins' book tells actors all they need to know about the realities of the acting profession; the passion, the struggle, the noble idealism and the heartache.' 
HELEN MIRREN 
 
'It is thrilling that Micahel Simkins is having such success as a writer - anything to keep him off the stage' 
IAN MCKELLEN

The Rules of Acting

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Michael Simkins

Praise for The Rules of Acting

Readers at large will be rewarded with self-helpless laughter, generated by the absurdity and the blessedness of the job Simkins loves

As well as being an all-round actor, Simkins is a wonderfully knockabout writer, somehow managing to be world weary and full of joie de vivre at one and the same time

Hilarious ... a masterclass in the perils of being a luvvie

Readers at large will be rewarded with self-helpless laughter, generated by the absurdity and the blessedness of the job Simkins loves

As well as being an all-round actor, Simkins is a wonderfully knockabout writer, somehow managing to be world weary and full of joie de vivre at one and the same time

Hilarious ... a masterclass in the perils of being a luvvie

Readers at large will be rewarded with self-helpless laughter, generated by the absurdity and the blessedness of the job Simkins loves

As well as being an all-round actor, Simkins is a wonderfully knockabout writer, somehow managing to be world weary and full of joie de vivre at one and the same time

Hilarious ... a masterclass in the perils of being a luvvie

Books by Michael Simkins

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