And One Hit Wonderland, Kitty, where he bet that he could have a top 20 single somewhere in the world. He did an Edinburgh Festival show on that one, which I booked some years ago for a festival I used to programme. They were all highly entertaining books and he was a really nice chap - very amiable and obliging.

Any book written for popular entertainment is bound to take a certain amount of artistic licence and create some situations that are not entirely without embellishment. When it comes to Colin's books, I'm sure that the same is true, but they performed two quite important functions: they created a gateway into folk music and culture for "normal" people (as in non-folkies), and they got into regular bookshops, on train stations and such, where, you know, people without any particular interest in folk might actually pick them up and read them. To paraphrase someone earlier, complaining that they are not the books you might like them to be is like berating Paul Merton for not being Jeremy Paxman, or Sid Kipper for not being Martin Carthy.