Billy Liar (Penguin Decades)

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His habitual embroidery of the truth, has left him tangled in a web of pointless lies. He has told: The novel was published in 1959. Mary Bell based the three children on her own children, including Hayley Mills. [4]

His final column appeared in May and was, like all his work, hammered out on an elderly typewriter. Entitled It's English as She Is Spoke Innit?, it was about a taskforce looking into education reform for seven to 11-year-olds. He manages to sabotage his engagement to Barbara (aka "The Witch") by borrowing her engagement ring, supposedly to take it to the jeweller's "to be adjusted", and giving it to his other girlfriend Rita! Oh, and then there's Liz as well... His targets included politicians, civil servants and shop assistants and the satirical machinations of Clogthorpe council.

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It has been a privilege for the last 23 years to have such a legendary writer as part of the Daily Mail story. He will be massively missed."

Waterhouse's work brought him a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and three awards for Columnist of the Year in 1970, 1973 and 1978. He was appointed a CBE in 1991.Keith Waterhouse, who has died aged 80, always described himself as a lazy man, even though he produced a body of work that reduced his Fleet Street rivals to envious dismay. Apart from the novels, plays, film scripts, sitcoms and magazine articles that flowed unceasingly from his vintage Adler typewriter (he hated new technology), he also wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column, beginning in the Daily Mirror in 1970, and from 1988 for the Daily Mail, until the paper announced his retirement last May. As well as the scripts there was a growing list of novels, along with every conceivable award for his newspaper columns and his regular contributions to Punch. Although much of his work was comedy, like many professional humorists, Waterhouse hated people telling him jokes. He loved pubs and Soho drinking clubs, Gerry's in particular, but he dreaded bores, whom he savaged with a grumpy impatience. But Billy doesn’t change: he remains destructively irresponsible, with a childlike immaturity that seems incapable of recognising the inescapable consequences of his actions. In the real world, liars get caught out; thieves get caught; two-timers get dumped. Far from growth, all we see is moral and psychological stagnation. He’s a disaster waiting to happen: he’ll end up in jail or in a psych ward. Billy Liar is the chronicle of one decisive day in the life of its protagonist Billy Fisher; capturing brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town in Yorkshire after the second world war, it describes a young fantasist with a job at a 'funeral furnisher' and a bedroom at his parents' – and longing for escape to the Good Life in London. The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, said: "Keith was a genius, for whom the phrase 'Fleet Street legend' could have been invented. A consummate journalist, scintillating satirist and unrivalled chronicler of modern life and so much more.

Billy is an employee in an undertaker. He spends the first part of his Saturday morning at work, as everyone did in that era. He strolls around town, goes to the pub, meets a girlfriend or two and then comes down to earth. It’s a special day for Billy because he’s convinced himself that he is about to enter the big time as a comedy writer for a name in London. From start to finish, however, Billy is deluding himself. As well as daydreaming the day away in his beloved Ambrosia, he spends most of his time thinking. Billy has two types of thinking: No.1 thinking which is deliberate, and controlled; and No.2 thinking which consists of obsessive speculation about all the what-if's of life, and to be avoided. In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in its list of the 50 films that children should see by the age of 14. In 1999, the British Film Institute named Billy Liar number 76 in its list of the top 100 British films. As a newsman, he was a correspondent in America, the Soviet Union and Cyprus. And through Labour's links with the Mirror, he often drafted articles and speeches for party leaders Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.

Possible answer:

It was perhaps his best-known work - the story of a funeral parlour worker with a humdrum life, who spends most of his time dreaming of ways to escape his drab existence in Yorkshire. Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959, and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia. Read more Details William Fisher is an intriguing, complicated, sometimes likeable, but more often infuriating main character, who has a vast, phenomenal imagination, living for much of the time in the fictional Ambrosia, where he is the prime minister – but he does have other roles – and friends of his have important positions…this is a very useful, if not sine qua non artifice, given that the reality around him can be quite bleak – he indeed takes the machine gun he has in Ambrosia and uses it on the real humans that upset him, if only in his own mind…the gun does not exist – and besides, he does know this land does not exist outside his head, as opposed to the – let us say more than a billion at the very least – people who are convinced that Qanon is real, the world is led by lizards, pedophiles and that George Soros is the ultimate Satan…oh and Covid does not exist.