Money for old jokes?

Big literary news item of the week is of course that Howard Jacobson got the Booker for The Finkler Question, a novel which had mixed reviews, and certainly wasn’t the bookie’s favourite to win.  Lifetime achievement award, or overdue recognition of comic writing from the literary establishment? (I'll let you know when I've read it - still got last year's winner Wolf Hall on my bedside table, to be honest.)

If comic writing has been overlooked by prize judges, it certainly hasn’t been ignored by commercial publishers – the latest stand up to benefit from this is Michael McIntyre who (perhaps unwisely) informed interviewer Lynn Barber in a Sunday Times interview that he received a £2m advance from Michael Joseph for his memoir Life and Laughing.  (All the way to the bank?)

Depressed, moi? Professional writers do not get depressed when our authorial colleagues are a. garnered with awards or b.given shed-loads of money. No. We apply the biro to the page, and press on.