‘I’ve fallen in love with this fabulous foursome … They are a phenomenon!’ Drew Barrymore

From @theoldgays, the internet’s most beloved foursome, a book of inspirational stories and aspirational advice for living life at the fullest.

The Old Gays have taken TikTok by storm with their viral videos, by turns outrageous and hilarious, fashionable and fierce. But as four gay men, aged from 67 to 80, Mick, Jessay, Robert, and Bill have lived through decades of momentous change and they’ve got stories that take more than three minutes to tell.

They grew up in the closet, experienced Stonewall, lived large during the gay sexual revolution, lost friends during the AIDS crisis, dealt with their own HIV+ diagnoses, and saw gay marriage became legal. Between them, they’ve been through it all – divorce, depression, bankruptcy, near-death experiences. And then there’s the dinner parties, the nudism, the professional bodybuilding, the orgies and the matter of church.

These are the tales – sometimes scandalous, sometimes profound, sometimes heart-breaking – that only an older gay man can tell. Their Guide to the Good Life is a celebration of lives lived to the fullest, and the art of getting old without getting bored. Whether it’s ageing, coming out, losing everything, starting over, finding happiness or just injecting a little more fun into proceedings, it’s good to know someone’s been there before, and they’re more than happy to give their best, bawdiest, most hard-won advice.

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‘Ruskin Park is so much more than a memoir. It is tribute to an individual woman and a whole generation and class.’ – Justin Webb, The Sunday Times

‘Ruskin Park is Rory Cellan-Jones’s touching tribute to both his parents, but particularly to the mother he came to know more fully from the letters she left behind’ – Daily Mail

‘A captivating family detective story and a poignant social history of Britain.’ – Observer

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Can we ever really know the truth about our parents? From the popular journalist, podcaster and tweeter about his rescue dog #SophiefromRomania comes a moving memoir in search of the truth behind his isolated childhood and absent father.

Rory Cellan-Jones knew he was the child of a brief love affair between two unmarried BBC employees. But until his mother died and he found a previously unknown file labelled ‘For Rory’ he had no idea of their beginnings or ending, and why his peculiarly isolated childhood had so tested the bond between him and his mother. ‘For Rory,’ his mother had written on the file ‘in the hope that it will help him understand how it really was …’

This is a compelling account of what Rory uncovered in the papers, letters and diaries; a relationship between two colleagues (two romantics) and the restrictive forces of post-war respectability and prejudice that ended it. It is also an evocation of the progressive, centrifugal force at the centre of all their lives – the BBC itself.

Both tender and troubling, the drama moves from wartime radio broadcasts, to the glamour of 1950s television studios, to the golden era of BBC drama. His father may have directed The Forsyte Saga and Rory may have watched him from the corridors, but he would never actually meet him until much later in adulthood. Until then Rory’s life was bound to the one-bedroom flat he shared with his mother in Ruskin Park …

‘I loved this highly evocative, unpretentious memoir. It’s a small-scale BBC drama in itself.’ – The Times

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