NORTH FACE OF SOHO

Clive James (Picador, £17.99)

Doctors should prescribe the second instalment of Clive James's memoirs for anyone suffering mild depression. It is the funniest book I have ever read and the memory of this writer's ability to make me laugh out loud made me relish the prospect of this latest, fourth section of James's autobiography.

May Week was in June left off at the end of the Australian's days at Cambridge University, and North Face of Soho takes up the story in the late 1960s, when he tries to earn a living for the first time by writing for what he calls Grub Street - literary magazines prepared to print his book reviews and articles.

Then he gets taken on by The Observer, and is given the opportunity to write about TV. At the same time, he auditions to be a TV arts presenter, and soon becomes an established face on Britain's small screens.

James's prose is thought-provoking and amusing throughout, and there are plenty of colourful anecdotes along the way. He tells how he was forced to enter a hotel through a roof door to film an interview with Peter Sellers because the Pink Panther star had split up with Britt Ekland. He reveals how he and Anne Robinson performed a cabaret for Mrs Thatcher that he wrote at 40,000ft as they flew back from a press trip to China.

And he recalls how he ensured his pieces for The Observer read properly by joining the typesetters, who allowed him to make alterations before the page went off-stone.

But page for page, there are not as many belly laughs in this book as there are in Falling Towards England, or Unreliable Memoirs, which has now sold more than a million copies. That's because North Face of Soho is about a successful operator honing his craft, which is always going to be less funny than the writer's recollections about his mishaps on the way up.

A substantial part is James's take on the pressures of being a writer - what it's like to write for a deadline, what it's like to write without a deadline, and how he achieves a work-life balance.

I was relieved when James revealed he would be writing a sequel, but at the same time I felt slightly cheated. This is a comic writer who knows all the tricks of the books trade and two books will pay better than one.

Hopefully, he has decided to save some of his best gags until last.