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Published: 2 October 2008

Simon Pegg as celebrity hack Sidney Young

Young tales of a very old relationship

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE
Directed by Robert Weide
Certificate 15

CELEBRATING the differences between ourselves and our American cousins has been staple fare for writers and film-makers for the best part of a century.
Avowed Yankophile PG Wodehouse filled many a paperback with tales of blithering English idiots seducing swanky-doodle-dandies, and the trend found a new lease of life in the 1990s and early Noughties through Richard Curtis.
But you’d expect a screen version of journalist Toby Young’s navel-gazing confessional, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, about moving to New York and inflicting his upper-middle-class yobbo mentality on the serious New York hacks to be a little more than this. After all, his book on which this film is based is a collection musings on the crassness of the celebrity-driven media.
I liked the book, despite harbouring a long-held dislike of Young. This is for a number of reasons: he was despicably rude when I met him; and his newspaper work is often irritating tosh – lifestyle nonsense for the right-wing press. But the real reason he makes my skin crawl is simple jealousy: half-way through his tale he introduces love interest Caroline, the woman who was to become his wife. She used to live in Highgate and I had a mad crush on her.
Sadly the film bears little relation to his work. Instead it is a straight-forward rom-com about a beautiful American girl and a twit of an English lad.
We meet Sidney Young (Simon Pegg), who believes he is a mighty journo whose prose cuts through the showbiz nonsense peddled by our dailies. He is poached from his position as editor of trendy Post Modern Review and taken to New York to work for celeb mag Sharps, where he hopes to be a pin, lancing the boil of celeb news.
This agenda doesn’t last long. After around half an hour of grumbling about how silly the gossip game is, Young has a Damascene conversion. He leaves all his grandiose ideas and, to save his skin, sells out.
There are some gags which work, due to Pegg’s loveable persona, and the guiding hand of Jeff Bridges as his editor. Yet there are many that do not: a skit about how we love to get drunk and chant “Inger-lund” is as charmless as it sounds.
Sadly the film ignores too much of the good stuff Young created, but is still a passable tale of an Englishman in New York.

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