Walking in on Mum and Dad (Hardback)

Adventures in Embarrassment

Brian King

Shortly before Charles de Gaulle's retirement, his wife was asked by Harold Macmillan's wife Dorothy what she most looked forward to in the coming years. 'A penis', she declared. Coming to his wife's rescue, the former president remarked, "My dear, I think the English pronounce it 'appiness'"…"Walking in on Mum and Dad" relives many sorry tales of embarrassment, from author Bill Bryson snoring and dribbling in public to actor Patrick Stewart caught watching re-runs of "Star Trek". There are tales of sex and seduction gone horribly wrong, of indecent exposure on a grand scale, of emails which should never have been sent, of goalkeepers throwing the ball into their own net, of infidelity revealed – by a parrot. But why do we suffer embarrassment at all? And how can we overcome its power over us? Brian King searches for the antidote to embarrassment in science and psychology and by looking at his own experiences as well as hundreds of tales of mortifying misadventures suffered by others. Hilarious from a distance perhaps, but not when it happens to you…

Brian King who fainted into the arms of his manager on his first day in a supermarket job, and who was chased from a BBC department meeting by a moth, is the author of The Lying Ape, co-author of Beyond Coincidence, and an award-winning pioneer of radio fly-on-the-wall documentaries.