Please can you help me find some gentle, very English/UK humour for my elderly dad?

[BSJohnson]

He loved "Travels with Boogie", which I gave him after seeing a recommendation on here, and also "Secrets of a bookseller". He also enjoyed Bill Bryson's books two England books, and "A walk in the woods". I also know he read and enjoyed "three men in a boat" years ago.

He doesn't usually read fiction, but I get the impression he likes gentle, English humour, but clever, not twee. He's sharp as a tack, and grasps contemporary references and modern culture, but doesn't not partake of them! Has anyone got any bright ideas, please?

He/you may now be replete but can I also suggest the Mapp and Lucia e f benson books. Nicely the first two in the series are perhaps the very funniest - laugh out loud.
My own dad when elderly loved Just William - audio books in his case - he loved his little iPod which I used to load up for him.

The Papers of A J Wentworth BA by H F Ellis

I'm glad he enjoyed the Boogie books. I always recommend for a good laugh out loud read.

In a similar vein I also really like Tony Hawkes books - Round Ireland with a Fridge is good, also Playing the Moldovans at Tennis and the one where he tries to write a number 1 single - can't remember the name. Good to see the mentions earlier for Stuart Marconie and John O'Farrell - I enjoy their books too.

Maybe not for your dad, but if anyone is looking for a really funny book I loved Emma Kennedy's first book - The Tent , the Bucket and Me, the follow up about her trip to San Francisco was good in parts, but not the same wit as her first.

Helen Simonson ‘Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand’.
I’ve given it away for so many secret Santa’s. It’s about an elderly man in a gentle English village and the goings on in the golf club. It’s fantastically written and not at all twee.

I was also going to recommend “the tent, the bucket and me” by Emma Kennedy - very funny! Along the travel lines, Driving over Lemons series by Chris Stewart is a funny series about moving to and living in rural Spain.
And if he hasn’t read Michael Palin’s diaries, there are three volumes and they are wonderful.
For all the James Herriot fans on this thread, I’ve recently listened to all the Christopher Timothy read audiobooks - they’re wonderful to listen to as you potter around. I’m v familiar with the books but it was great to listen to them as well!

Don’t Mr Disraeli. By Caryl Brahms and S J Simon.
The funniest book I’ve ever read.
You’d possibly need to look on e-bay.

Deric Longden has written books that have a funny way of looking at life. But I would steer away from Diana's Story which is about the death of his first wife. A good book, but perhaps not the best one to read first.

I'm going to look up some of these recommendations myself.

Dear Lupin books by Roger Mortimer I found very English and funny, but poignant.

Oh I'd forgotten Deric Longden - "Lost For Words" is one of the funniest books I have ever read.
"A SPRITE, Mrs Longden, a SPRITE!"

Some of these are not very gentle or very English or either but there is a Bollinger Everyman Prize for comic fiction.

Has he read David Lodge's novels? - Small Changes and two others are a trilogy of campus novels. Lodge is now in his 80s - these are his early work.

From the same list, Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club

Alan Bennett, various fiction and non fiction

Love, Nina is Nina Stibbe's letters home to her sister in Leicestershire in the early 80s. She was a rather uncoventional nanny for a literary single parent household - her employer was the editor of the London Review of Books and Alan Bennett is a neighbour and is constantly round for dinner/gossip. Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn are also neighbours and Tomalin's disabled son's carer becomes a good friend and perhaps more.... It is very funny.

There are a few publishers and imprints who bring out a lot of mid 20th century fiction - much by women, a few books by men, some quite interesting social comedy of various levels from gentle on. Examples include Virago Modern Classics, Persephone Books and Dean Street Press (Furrowed Middlebrow). Persephone books include some non fiction as well as fiction.

Suggestions:
Barbara Pym (VMC)
DE Stevenson - Persephone and Furrowed Middlebrow - Miss Buncle's Book (Persephone) is very funny
Barbara Euphan Todd's Miss Rankill Comes Home - first published during WW2 - After a few years stuck on a desert island, Miss Rankill finally gets back to England to find daily life has changed in all kinds of ways

Chris Paling, Reading Allowed is by a former BBC producer and novelist turned public library worker, about working in a large public library and the borrowers who turn up to use the library. When I borrowed a copy from a library someone else reserved it (it was relatively new) and I wondered if a library worker had thought, ooh, interesting....

Have you tried Mark Wallingtons other books, 500 Mile Walkies, Boogie on the river?

Miss Buncle's Book by DE Stevenson

The Adrian Mole series?

Many thanks to the PP who reminded me about Nigel Barley, I read it at least 20 years ago and it's perfect for lockdown.
I once used reading back to back Bill Bryson as a cure for a mild but persistant depression and it worked! This thread is giving me ideas for the next time.

What about Pratchett?

I'm a little wary because my own father is dead set against anything that couldn't actually be true, but assuming that's not a problem then the humour is very intelligent and very English (as are several of the settings, despite being on a world sustained and suffused by magic).

Unless he's already a fantasy fan I wouldn't start with the first one. Guards! Guards! is a good place to jump in, or Wyrd Sisters, or Mort.

His trilogy Truckers, Diggers, Wings (aka the Bromeliad), while dealing with what might be considered impossibly small humanoids, is otherwise entirely realistic () and very funny. Its first section is a take-off of biblical style. The trilogy that starts with "Only You Can Save Mankind" is worth a mention. Good Omens is also delightful (and unlike the previous two, written for adults).

David Nobbs

Second from last in the sack race - very very funny

I came on to suggest Gerald Durrell too as My Family And Other Animals is just such fun. And there are lots more too. Ended up reading through - lots of great ideas on here! It's hard to beat PG Wodehouse for hands down hilarity and the perfection of his writing.

Does he like crime/mystery? Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers would be my favourite Golden Age three for great characters, plots and writing. A pp also mentioned Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen books which are good fun. I like to retreat into the past when modern life isn't a very happy place to be, so books written in the middle section of the 20th century are just about right for me

Alexander McCall Smith is also fantastic. Gentle but not fluffy, and full of humour, quiet wisdom and kindness.

Anything by David Lodge. Deaf Sentence is wonderful.

I love Simon Brett's stuff. Mysteries featuring Charles Paris - mostly out of work Actor. The audible one features the voice of Bill Nighy. Lovely!

He also has mysteries with two women who are amatuer sleuths - I think this is the Fethering series of books Also some featuring a Mrs Pargiter. Her husband is dead and was a crook (though she would never admit to that). She has a black book of names of people he 'worked' with and often calls upon them for favours.

Love them all. I think he has written other series as well.

I just came back to this thread and realised how many more wonderful recommendations there are now! Thank you so much. I am going to be coming back to this for ideas again and again.

Ha @Merryhouse ! As you can tell from my username, I'm a Pratchett fan myself. DF not so much, sadly. I don't think he's ever read any fantasy of any type in his life - he's definitely prejudiced!

Perhaps Tom Sharpe?

Phyllis Law Notes to my mother-in-law was lovely

@DiscontentedWoman

Phyllis Law Notes to my mother-in-law was lovely

Phyllida, not bloody Phyllis

Magnus Mills. Very British, slightly wry humour. You read each novel in a state of anticipation as so much is suggested and yet the denouement, when it comes, is as understated as the whole plot. So hard to describe just how clever they are.