Anything is Possible

OK, let's be honest - nobody expects a rushed book by a new pop star to be up to Pulitzer Prize standards. If it is as good as an average low-brow magazine article, then its target audience will be satisfied - and why not?

But Anything is Possible is not just scraping the bottom of the barrel. It is scraping the bottom of the swamp which the barrel happens to be floating in. It is a pernicious, cynical, repellent little book - and, because of that, every Will Young fan should read it. They might begin to glimpse the true nature of their "idol".

The book takes the form of Will's "diary", starting from his application to Pop Idol, through his victory, and into the first weeks of stardom. Sounds straightforward - except Will quite obviously didn't keep a diary during Pop Idol. Several of the supposed "diary entries" refer to events which happen after the date on which the entry was supposedly written.

The whole book has, then, very obviously been written retrospectively. Every time he says, "Wish me luck!" or, "I wish I knew what was going to happen," Will is working on the assumption that his readers are too thick to make even these simple deductions.

The persona which Young carefully crafted during Pop Idol is perpetuated here. The constant false ingratiation with his audience ("I hope you like it!" he says desperately in the introduction), the studied blandness which is calculated to avoid offending anyone (everything is "amazing", " fantastic", "wonderful") - it is all rather reminiscent of Tony Blair circa 1997, except Blair was at least playing this stupid game for the sake of more than his own greed and egotism.

What is most striking, however, is that Young's constant self-depreciation masks a remarkably high opinion of himself. He describes himself as "quite modest", something which no modest person would ever say by definition. He was horrified when Simon Cowell made the (perfectly fair) comment that his performance on one particular show was "only average", and responds in the book by saying petulantly, "How dare he interrupt me?" This is the voice of an over-privileged public schoolboy who is used to being given what he wants, when he wants. It is the voice, I suspect, of the real Will Young.

A truthful autobiography by Will could have been interesting. He refers passingly to a period of depression in his second year at university when "I lost confidence in myself". Indeed, to hear what he really thought of the corporate machine which has taken over his life (as well as gossip about his fellow Pop Idol finalists) would have been fascinating. Instead, he has served us up rubbish.