If you were born before the 1980s you'll probably remember Terry Christian as that gobby Manc from Channel 4 youf culture show The Word. It was the programme that wasn't as good as The Tube but better than BBC's No Limits. It ran from 1990 to 1995 and featured irreverent interviews with Hollywood stars and Madchester bands with silly sketches conducted by Amanda de Cadenet and Christian, who always seemed to have a piece of hair sticking up from the crown of his bonce.

I for one had completely forgotten about this show but upon reading the introduction here was reminded just how revolutionary it was. Christian presumably felt enough time has elapsed for a quasi-nostalgic treatment of the show and its cultural import. It's only after reading about 50 pages that you remember how prissy and arrogant Christian was on screen.

It all comes flooding back: the prose is written like he talks.

One paragraph begins thus:

"I've got an extremely sore ring piece and things aren't looking good." Christian, you see, was suffering with haemorrhoids.

Most of the book is concerned with how much Christian was hated. Hated by his employers, hated by the media, hated by the establishment. Long passages are quite entertaining, particularly when he sheds some light on what it takes to get into the media in Britain. "If you have a first-class honours degree in journalism and are currently slogging your guts out at some small free paper in the north of England, " he writes, "just remember work hard and believe in yourself . . . ha ha ha." You see, Christian's parents were both Irish and he grew up at a time when northern accents were scarcely heard on TV or radio, the exceptions being Andy Kershaw and Dave Lee Travis. One passage is devoted to the British publicschool system and how descendants of the SS made their way through the right schools to end up in positions of great power in Channel 4. I'm sure the lawyers had to very carefully word the prose. No pun intended.

Christian doesn't shy away from telling us what a legend he was in Manchester. He writes of a friendship with Mark E Smith of The Fall and how he once purchased a copy of RF Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972 in order to show his public-schoolboy boss that he was actually intelligent.

The bulk of the book is taken up by amusing, if lengthy, asides on interviewing A-list celebs in the US and what crazy dudes they really were . . . the presenters, that is.

But despite the chip-on-hisshoulder approach, Christian's story is worthy and, put in an Irish context, thought-provoking. How many working-class men or women from Limerick, Cork, Dublin, or anywhere for that matter, have made it in Irish broadcasting and media?

Throughout Christian's book, though, the subtext is one of righteous vindication. Everybody hated him because he was real, he was edgy and, most importantly, he didn't care. Above all, Christian describes how hard he found it to operate in TV land and how he never really gave himself a chance.

After the show was canned, he slipped back into obscurity, having made very little money. "It would be pointless me being a millionaire, " he concludes, ". . . I'd rather busy myself annoying all those self-important fakes. Maybe it's that kind of fatalistic honesty that truly makes you an arrogant arsehole and a twat." Terry Christian: the self-made anti-hero.