The lies begin

Jimmy Conway, a thirty-something teacher of English to foreign students, wants to be famous: "Fame wouldn't just bring status and respect and money and purpose. It would mean an end to being so bloody lonely all the time." He shares a rented house with Betty the Border collie in the Sussex backwater of Seaford where Billy Scrivens, a famous funny man, goes jogging. When Billy suddenly pops his clogs Jimmy decides to con his way into the Hello!-sponsored funeral.

He claims to be a stand-up comedian who refuses to perform on television. In fact, Jimmy has not performed anywhere, ever. The assembled celebrities lap up his lies and even claim to have seen him do his trademark "fish routine". The game of gagman's bluff is on. One year later Jimmy, still floundering, finds himself on stage at the packed London Palladium. Will he get his comic comeuppance?

It is tempting to say that Jimmy and his creator, journalist John O'Farrell, are both pretending to be something they are not: in the latter's case, a novelist. While this would be unfair, it is not untrue to say they are both shortchanging themselves.

Jimmy, the self-pitying slacker, does at least discover some shred of moral fibre in the end. O'Farrell, on the other hand, rather than bothering to establish credible characters and working hard to analyse wayward emotions, settles instead for easy laughs.

Then again, This Is Your Life is billed as a comic turn. However, signs of a more serious work lurk within it - and they are the highlights of the show.

The trouble is the world of the celebrity, while exciting to many outsiders, is as empty as the inside of a ping-pong ball. As Jimmy remarks, "It's all so shallow, isn't it?" Too much has been written about the glitterati already and, apart from pointing out that - just like their admirers - they are often vain, stupid and vicious, there is nothing else to add.

O'Farrell illustrates this in a variety of all-too-familiar scenes. Satire should provoke shocks not smirks. Furthermore, the reader is invited to laugh at Jimmy's ignorance - he asks a waiter how much the free champagne costs - rather than with him, yet the grossly sentimental denouement (which follows a genuinely surprising twist) suggests he deserves sympathy not antipathy.

Each chapter begins with a letter that the 13-year-old Jimmy wrote to his future "famous" self. The fact that he hardly sounds any different to the adult Jimmy is part of the joke: the "very good-looking" loser still has to grow up.

The letters also testify to O'Farrell's ambition to produce something more substantial than a sequence of one-liners. Jimmy refers to "the gulf between where you are now and where you had hoped to be", but this promising theme is not developed and the ultimate message that true happiness often lies where least expected - ie, under your nose (and that does not mean cocaine) - is a sop to no-brow readers who prefer chuckles to challenges.

The most interesting relationship is that between Jimmy and Nicholas, his elder brother. Their "butterflybrained" mother's stream-of-consciousness conversations are also a delight. Again, though, instead of exploring family ties, O'Farrell prefers to make jokes about body-piercing, Friends Reunited and words like "cummerbund".