What is it like to work for a true maverick, however brilliant?
'I was eighteen - eager and newly arrived in London - when I met Thelma Holt in 1984. She was fifty-two, three times married, dating a man fifteen years her junior and living alone in West London with a vicious cat called Shiva.
'She'd spotted me on work experience at the Theatre of Comedy, en route, or so I thought, to drama school. Within a fortnight she had stolen me, sent me to evening classes to learn to type, organised a miniscule salary, cancelled my audition for RADA and renamed me. From that moment I became Sweetpea.'
By turns shrewd, comic and reflective, Get Me the Urgent Biscuits recalls life in the orbit of a theatrical impresario. Under Thelma Holt's tutelage, the extraordinary soon became the ordinary. Sweetpea's education would last twenty years, taking in eccentric demands, irascible directors and a hot-air balloon ride with British theatre's finest.
Part The Dresser, part The Devil Wears Prada, this beguiling memoir deftly captures a vanishing world of indomitable egos and seemingly boundless possibilities.
