Liam Rudden: Do you have a guilty secret?

Published on Tuesday 13 January 2009 14:22

IT'S an empty shell now. A fluorescent-lit warehouse with nothing to store. Even the wall units have been ripped from their mounts.

Woolworth's in Leith's Kirkgate, like the chain's 800 or so other stores across the UK and beyond, has closed.

I'm going to miss that store in particular for one reason – it was there, in 1974, that I bought my first paperback. A book that started the collection I still keep to this day and now includes authors as diverse as Dame Ngaio Marsh, Dennis Wheatley and Ken McClure, three of the authors I happily list as my guilty pleasures.

I remember being attracted to that first book by the title, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. I hadn't seen that one on TV.

Later I would be at first bemused, and then thrilled to find the tale familiar... the TV version had gone under the title Spearhead From Space, Jon Pertwee's debut as the Doctor.

In an age when video recorders were out of the reach of most pockets and CDs, let alone DVDs, were the stuff of Tomorrow's World, a book – as the little fat nine-year-old who used to masquerade as me quickly discovered – was the only way of reliving a favourite TV adventure.

Unless, of course, it happened to be repeated, a rare occurrence back then and, in the case of Doctor Who, the repeat was usually edited down into a feature-length TV film.

I can still see the shelves of books, stacked to the right of the Fit o' the Walk entrance to the Leith Woolies now – ironically, where the DVDs were latterly. Many an hour was spent perusing them in the days when you could pick up as brand-new paperback for 30 pence.

To this day, re-reading that book, which was penned by one of the most prolific TV writers of his generation, Terrence Dicks, remains one of my secret pleasures.

And it seems I'm not the only one who enjoys nothing better than locking myself away with a good old pot-boiler of a book, which is why World Book Day is looking for your help to uncover 'The Nation's Guilty Reading Secrets'.

Reading might be one of life's great pleasures and wonderfully educational, however, sometimes it can be even more fun if it is a guilty pleasure rather than a virtuous one.

World Book Day (which this year falls on March 5) will conduct an online survey in an attempt to uncover the nation's naughty ways.

Have you ever claimed to be reading Madame Bovary when actually you were curled up with a Mills & Boon? Or boasted that you were testing yourself with A Brief History of Time when really you were enjoying a John Grisham?

Have you ever been late for work after being up all night finishing that can't-put-down Harry Potter novel? Do you ever turn to the back of the book to find out what happens before you have finished?

Now's the time to confess. Just complete the short survey at www.spread-the-word.org.uk/guilty-secrets/ and the nation's secrets will then be revealed on World Book Day. Voting closes on February 20.