'One-Take Weller'

Non-Fiction

Pages: 284 Ratings:

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In 1971, Al Weller, 25, married with a young daughter, is content with his blue-collar life. Though skilled in commercial art, he prefers manual labour and truck driving, enjoying pints with mates after work.

A chance suggestion from his friend ‘Lawse’ leads Al to moonlight as an ‘ad face’ (advertising model). For nine months, he juggles an odd double life - delivering dairy products to posh hotels while posing for knitting patterns and romance magazines.

Al’s world turns upside down when his face suddenly appears on deodorant posters plastered across London’s buses and Underground. This unexpected fame catapults him into a new reality, challenging his comfortable working-class existence.

Al Weller was born in London in 1946. Leaving state school at age fifteen and without qualifications, he was able to gain a place at Harrow School of Art. However, after only eighteen months, the lure of cash to spend on a life of excess in the ‘Swinging Sixties’ took him into marriage and fatherhood at nineteen. After happily working in a myriad of jobs for many years, he eventually built up a small woodworking business.

After retiring to France with his second wife, her sudden death brought him back to the UK, where he now lives alone, writing.