Ken Bell author was born in the Manchester of 1956 and left school at the age of 15 in 1971. He then spent the next decade working variously as a cinema projectionist, photographer and nightclub doorman.

In 1981 he was made redundant, and lacking anything else to do he decided to schmooze the admissions tutors of Ruskin College, Oxford, into letting him enter their hallowed portals, which they did in 1983. In spite of spending the next two years getting gloriously drunk in the bar of the Oxford Union every evening, he still was able to fool those same tutors into thinking that he had actually done some work, with the result that they gave him a diploma.

He decided to go to the University of Manchester in 1985 and was lucky in that his interview was the day after Oxford rejected Margaret Thatcher for an honorary degree. News travelled slowly in that dear, pre-Internet era and he was the first person to reach the University of Manchester after Oxford had given something for Britain to cheer about in that dark period in our island nation’s history. Thus, the interview consisted of telling an ever-growing band of Manchester dons just how much fun had been had in Oxford the day before.

Ken now lives in Edinburgh, is happily married and is convinced that his marriage will remain blessed just so long as his wife lives on another continent from him. He is the father of three very large and thuggish sons, who are all chips off the old cock.