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Making News
Making News is a darkly hilarious story about celebrity culture and the contentious phone-hacking lows Fleet Street media uses to produce a tabloid that everyone loves to read.
Tabloids are fun until your dad becomes the story...
Lucas Dekker is celebrity offspring, twice over. His Australian father, Charlie, has recently retired from a stellar football career in the Premier League. His English mother, Monica, is a self-help guru, who has sold millions of books with her pro-family message. But when Charlie's involvement in a bizarre sex scandal hits the tabloids, the Dekkers' own family dynamic will never be the same again.
Tabloids are fun until your dad becomes the story...
Lucas Dekker is celebrity offspring, twice over. His Australian father, Charlie, has recently retired from a stellar football career in the Premier League. His English mother, Monica, is a self-help guru, who has sold millions of books with her pro-family message. But when Charlie's involvement in a bizarre sex scandal hits the tabloids, the Dekkers' own family dynamic will never be the same again.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
3 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
About the author
Tony Wilson
10 books18 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 6, 2018
Darkly funny and a rather enjoyable read :)
November 29, 2016
A comic novel that centres around Charlie Dekker, a retired Australian international footballer who played for Liverpool, then Saints, and then Fulham before retiring
Along the way he was also part of Australia's 2006 World Cup Squad that beat the Italians in the round of 16 and made it to the semi finals
So yes, it's complete fantasy - Fabio Grosso's extravagant tumble in Germany is not ruled a penalty and Saints acquire a player from the Scousers !
As for the plot, it's pretty good
Charlie has a young son who has inherited none of his father's football skills but a lot of his mother's writing skills
The son gets approached by an English tabloid paper to write articles and he accepts
The problem is that this is the very same paper that had previously published a libellous article claiming Charlie was gay - and Charlie is not at all pleased
The story does move pretty slowly until half way when Charlie ends up with two hookers and gets video taped in the process - at which point everyone's lives are turned upside down
From there it moves pretty rapidly and with plenty of humour until the final resolution which comes with an unseen twist
Wilson is a skillful story teller and he knows his football, and the way he weaves fictional and actual characters together is impressive
You kind of forget that the Dekkers are not a real family
The book isn't laugh out loud funny but I did chuckle - especially at the scenes that depicted Charlie, his wife, and his son arguing as their family falls apart
3 out of 5 stars
Along the way he was also part of Australia's 2006 World Cup Squad that beat the Italians in the round of 16 and made it to the semi finals
So yes, it's complete fantasy - Fabio Grosso's extravagant tumble in Germany is not ruled a penalty and Saints acquire a player from the Scousers !
As for the plot, it's pretty good
Charlie has a young son who has inherited none of his father's football skills but a lot of his mother's writing skills
The son gets approached by an English tabloid paper to write articles and he accepts
The problem is that this is the very same paper that had previously published a libellous article claiming Charlie was gay - and Charlie is not at all pleased
The story does move pretty slowly until half way when Charlie ends up with two hookers and gets video taped in the process - at which point everyone's lives are turned upside down
From there it moves pretty rapidly and with plenty of humour until the final resolution which comes with an unseen twist
Wilson is a skillful story teller and he knows his football, and the way he weaves fictional and actual characters together is impressive
You kind of forget that the Dekkers are not a real family
The book isn't laugh out loud funny but I did chuckle - especially at the scenes that depicted Charlie, his wife, and his son arguing as their family falls apart
3 out of 5 stars
December 10, 2011
Authors of alternate history novels often focus on changing the big events, answering the questions like: What if the South won the Civil War? However, in his reasonably funny novel Tony Wilson partly addresses a far more emotionally charged issue: What if Fabio Grosso's extravagant tumble against Australia at the 2006 World Cup had been ruled a dive, and Australia had gone on to win? For Socceroos fans such as myself, this section is likely to generate a smile tinged with a disgruntled acceptance of reality.
Apart from this enjoyable hypothetical, the novel, surrounding a famous family humiliated by a British tabloid sex scandal, feels simultaneously brilliantly prescient and utterly inadequate as, in the wake of News of the World, the truth about the culture of tabloid exploitation has been exposed as much stranger and darker than any fictional tale. There is a good deal of humour to be found too, but I felt that Making News lacked the satirical bite and 'Network'-style sense of ridiculousness that made Players so entertaining.
Apart from this enjoyable hypothetical, the novel, surrounding a famous family humiliated by a British tabloid sex scandal, feels simultaneously brilliantly prescient and utterly inadequate as, in the wake of News of the World, the truth about the culture of tabloid exploitation has been exposed as much stranger and darker than any fictional tale. There is a good deal of humour to be found too, but I felt that Making News lacked the satirical bite and 'Network'-style sense of ridiculousness that made Players so entertaining.
July 27, 2010
I really wanted to like this. I am a big fan of Tony Wilson especially during his time with RRR. But this book just didn’t seem to do justice to his talent. It was funny in places but those places where few and far between. Overlong and unnecessary sub-plots didn’t help the cause. The 12 pages both he and I wasted on Fadi and the Mussies and their extremely fantastical appearance at the climax of the book was really hard to take. This was not the only time the novel strayed into the absurd (see the teacher Ms Sharma). As I said I really did want to love this. Its premises was excellent and the character of Lucas well drawn and delivered but overall it was a disappointment.
March 6, 2013
Tony Wilson is great at picking a topic and then highlighting everything about the topic that is funny. Making News is his take on tabloid press (memo Fairfax: tabloid, not compact, but be careful). The tabloid editors are an easy target but this book does a great job at bringing out the personalities that make tabloid media so crazy. Well worth a read.
January 15, 2013
A very clever and entertaining read. After a little while, you kind of forget that the Dekkers are really fictional characters.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews