Memoir/Róisín Ingle: Despite his avuncular image as presenter of the BBC's Opportunity Knocks talent contest, Hughie Green was a man with terrible secrets.
The darkest of these became public at his funeral in 1997 when his "friend", Noel Botham, announced to mourners that, along with juggling four mistresses at the time of his death from cancer, Green was also the natural father of a well-known female celebrity.
The late Paula Yates had just buried her partner Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS and father of her child, Tiger, when DNA tests confirmed she was indeed a daughter of Hughie Green. The troubled star would go on to lose a custody battle for her three children with her ex-husband, Bob Geldof. As one commentator put it at the time, "within a month Paula lost her future and her past".
At the age of 50, co-writer Christopher Green - described here as "the only legitimate son" of Hughie - had a new sister. The book opens with his first and only meeting with his half-sister in England as part of a Sun newspaper exclusive in 1998. He remembers that Yates, who died of a drug overdose three years ago, told him that she was unwell, adding "I will not be well again". He also recalls her searching questions about Hughie Green and his vendetta against the man she thought was her real father, Jess Yates, presenter of religious show Stars on Sunday. Green had destroyed Jess Yates's career by revealing that the whiter-than-white presenter was having an affair with a showgirl.
The book - which would be more aptly subtitled "they f**k you up, your mum and dad" - is billed as Green's attempt to answer Yates's questions. In the process, Green unearths the sad truth about his father's miserable childhood, an upbringing which Green claims sowed the seeds for his father's later relentless philandering and parental cruelty. Unwanted by his mother, Violet, Hughie Green spent much of his early life separated from both parents, being cared for by staff in their country mansion. His father, Major Green, took more interest in the boy when he realised his son's musical and comedic talent could be the meal-ticket he needed to keep his adulterous wife from leaving him. As creator of The Gang Show, a touring variety act, Hughie Green was one of Britain's first child stars, and the money poured in.
A pivotal event occurred on tour in Canada when the 17-year-old Hughie walked in on his mother Violet having sex with a strange man, while his father wept outside in the hotel corridor. Hughie Green despised the weakness of his father, and it was this determination never to be ill-treated by a woman, the author contends, that contributed to his own later cruelty to his wife and to his children.
A serial womaniser and heavy drinker who was on the prescription drug Benzedrine for most of his life, Green sired five children apart from the two he had with his wife, Claire.
Paula Yates was conceived in Wales just weeks after her mother, Elaine Smith, had married Jess Yates, a friend of Hughie Green. To Yates's disgust, Elaine Smith (who changed her name to Helene Toren) denied Green could be her daughter's father up until the DNA tests proved her parentage. According to Christopher Green, the mother and daughter relationship would never recover.
The latter part of this book is largely taken up by Green's inelegant argument as to why he and his wife, Lynne, should have been offered custody of Tiger following Yates's death. Green lives in Canada and has only met the child once for a few minutes. Despite this, he contends that because he was a "blood relative" of Yates, Tiger might reasonably have been placed with him.
The author's credibility is severely undermined by the curious insistence that he should have been part of the custody process and his questioning of whether Yates would have wanted Geldof to take care of Tiger. On this point it is difficult to take the author seriously. That the child would feel more secure with strangers thousands of miles away from home than she would close to her three sisters, with whom who she had already developed a bond, is at best misguided. Christopher Green may be the only "legitimate" son of the Opportunity Knocks presenter, but he alone knows whether that antiquated word can be used to describe his true motivation for writing this sad book.
Hughie and Paula: The Tangled Lives of Hughie Green and Paula Yates. By Christopher Green, with Carol Clerk Robson Books, 333pp. £16.95
Róisín Ingle is an Irish Times journalist