Charlie Connelly is a bestselling author and award-winning broadcaster. His seven books include Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round The Shipping Forecast and most recently In Search of Elvis: A Journey To Find The Man Beneath The Jumpsuit. He is also a presenter on the BBC1 Holiday programme and BBC Radio 4's Traveller's Tree.
Among other things, he has performed 'Blue Moon of Kentucky' on national television in Uzbekistan in a duet with the nation's biggest pop star, been made the official ambassador to England of a breakaway Lithuanian republic, had Kate Adie whispering a Dustin Hoffman impersonation into his ear, been hounded by the press after being falsely accused by the Daily Mail of intending to annex the island of Rockall and been challenged via the media to a fist fight by Ben Fogle. All by accident.
Charlie was born in west London in the late summer of 1970. Conceived in the sixties and born in the seventies, this juxtaposition of decades has left its mark, however, as Charlie manages to combine the laid back disorganization of the era of free love with the sartorial cluelessness of the following decade.
Within eighteen months the infant Charlie had, with the use of flipcharts and government statistics, persuaded his parents to move south of the river and he grew up in that exclusive part of London that doesn't have the tube. Sent to a school that produced Olympic athletes and inexplicably regarded the best route to personal fulfilment to lie in rugby union, Charlie naturally turned out to be a runner so slow that he was once lapped by the following year's sports day, and a Charlton Athletic supporter.
Having got through most of the eighties reasonably unscathed, an unfortunate and decade- late brush with punk notwithstanding, he left school and went to the University of Essex. Colchester, he had learned, is Britain's oldest recorded town and Charlie wanted to hear the recording.
In 1993 Charlie left university and stumbled into a job putting on music tours and festivals, and from there he attempted various careers from musician to laboratory technician to mortuary assistant to artist manager to tee-shirt packer to sound engineer with varying degrees of fiscal catastrophe.
It was when he found himself living in Penge (where locals are to this day trying to hook the full moon out of the pond with a hoe) and working as marketing manager for the Complete Works of Lenin that Charlie finally returned his hand to writing.
His first book was published in 1998 and he hasn't looked back since. Which is a pity because about a year ago he dropped his wallet.
On the publication of his first book, Charlie became a full-time writer specialising in travel and sport. His literary travels have taken him to places as diverse as Liechtenstein, Arctic Norway, the wilds of rural Bosnia, the Principality of Sealand and Stevenage Borough Football Club.
Charlie's sixth book, Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, was first published in the summer of 2004, was serialised on Radio 4 and in the Daily Telegraph and led to his giving a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and a sell-out show at the Edinburgh Festival.
In Search of Elvis: A Journey To Find The Man Beneath The Jumpsuit was published early in 2007, with an audiobook version narrated by Julian Rhind-Tutt and featuring Charlie's extremely dodgy ukulele playing.
Charlie's writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Telegraph, Word, Arena, Time Out, The Herald, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald and, unbelievably for someone who openly dislikes the game, International Rugby News. His broadcast experience includes the Holiday programme, the Big Breakfast, Radio 4's Excess Baggage, BBC2, Radio 2, the World Service and Sky.
