Happy As

Book excerpt: Larry Emdur is one of Australia's most popular and enduring TV personalities. Happy As is a memoir of becoming Larry. Long before the game shows and morning TV, Larry Emdur was just Larry, a cheeky kid from Bondi who grew up paddling round the kiddies' pool on a foam surfboard, and rocking a safari suit and bowl haircut. It was an idyllic childhood growing up in the 1970s and '80s, dominated by endless summers, adventures with mates, sunburnt noses and board rashes, all underpinned by his dad's simple rule: 'Be nice to everyone.' Told with wit and warmth, Happy As charts Larry's career as a professional show-off, from winner of the Rose Bay Public School marching parade to living-room fixture. From his first 'job' pinching golf balls to that big TV break; from awkward teen romances to true love; from the less-than-impressed prize winners on The Price is Right to unexpectedly bonding with Yoko Ono - this is a life-affirming collection of stories about the enduring love of family and friends, and just how far being nice to everyone will get you. A perfect blend of nostalgia, side-splitting humour and heartbreaking pathos that will leave you wishing it was the '80s again. Emdur's laugh-out-loud chronicle of his four decades in television, the book also serves as a sepia-toned recollection of a time when childhoods were long and families were everything. Angela Mollard, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH