Nick Frost at Waterstones in Liverpool. October 2015. Photgraph by Ian D. Hall.

Nick Frost’s memoirs are as colourful as the man is exuberant and lively. A man to whom the world of acting has taken a dramatic shine to since he first appeared on television and to whom so much has happened on screen as it has away from it.

An audience with Nick Frost somehow has the charm of a cosy night locked in the local pub, the weather may have been tipping it down for days, the bleakness of the outside world enhanced by the drab and doleful as they linger over their pints and the bemoaning of the situation at any point and any time in the outside world, their faces rooted in the downcast and despondent until Mr. Frost comes over and suddenly the fire that has been untouched for years gets a new appreciation and the stories, some of them desperately sad but filled with great love and attention, come bounding out from the mouth of a man whose lust for life and self-discovery is contagious.

As the audience inside Waterstones in Liverpool One were soon to find out, Nock Frost perhaps should never have become the star he is, and yet somehow was always destined to be, part rugby lover, part waiter, all man of impossible tale and one to whom every word, every manner of exploit is as cool and perhaps dangerous as could be expected for a lad from Dagenham.

Waterstones has had many a great guest speaker as the written word finds new ways to stay ahead of the idle curve that threatens to destroy it, some have been extraordinary and yet none perhaps have taken the crowd assembled on a journey through one of the nation’s most implausible heroes, one who truly can conjure up an image of the self-made and easily identifiable.

In an hour in which the laughter was ever present, the journey he has been on, from finding his house that he shared with Simon Pegg was full of armed police, to the day he was asked to leave a particular Kibbutz due to his obsession of carrying around the Kettle of Doom and to his own mother who died too early and it taking a furious one sided argument on a wet Welsh hillside six years after her passing to resolve the anger he felt, the journey has made him who he is and it was one that an audience with was full of memory and collective joy.

Straight forward, honest to the point of appreciation that shone brightly in the eyes of the audience and a person you would hope would sit next to you and dispel the gloom, Nick Frost’s brief time in the city was one that might be difficult to top as speakers at Waterstones go; an enjoyable and very revealing subject.

Nick Frost’s memoir Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies is out now.

Ian D. Hall