The Last Ealing Comedy - Tapa blanda

Alastair Strange is having trouble. His girlfriend Martha, tired of late night telly and takeaway pizzas, has reinvented herself as the real estate princess of Putney. His dream job has turned into a nightmare and his Dad's been arrested for burglary. Just when things couldn't get worse, along comes Alastair's old friend, society It-girl Tara, with a tantalising job offer. Alastair finds himself teaching media studies in an Ealing school. A cushy number, he thinks, but that's before Tara calls the favour in- The derelict Ealing Studios are next to the school - their presence haunts Alastair and acts as a continual motif for his story, combining the quirky wit and eccentricity of the Ealing films with an eye for the absurdities of modern urban life. Flat-sharing with the impossible Davenport, dealing with mysterious girls on the bus and disastrous blind dates, it would seem that there is, perhaps, one last comedy left in Ealing.

Matthew Baylis was born in Nottingham in 1971 and educated in Liverpool and Cambridge. After working as a literary agent, he went on to write storylines for BBC 1's 'EastEnders', and then to help the United Nations and British Council create the first pan-East African soap opera (scheduled for transmission in July 2002). He has written for a number of newspapers, including the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Independent on Sunday and Evening Standard. He also reviews fiction for the website Amazon.co.uk. His first novel, Stranger Than Fulham, was published in 1999.