Tony Victor Parsons (born 6 November 1953) is an English journalist, broadcaster, and author. He began his career as a music journalist for New Musical Express (NME), writing about punk music. Later he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write for the Daily Mirror for 18 years. Since September 2013, Parsons has written a column for The Sun. He was for a time a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show, and appeared infrequently on the successor Newsnight Review; he also briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth. Parsons is the author of the novel Man and Boy (1999). He had previously written a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983). Parsons has since published a series of best-selling novels – One For My Baby (2001), Man and Wife (2003), The Family Way (2004), Stories We Could Tell (2006), My Favourite Wife (2008), Starting Over (2009), Men From the Boys (2010), The Murder Bag (2014), and The Slaughter Man (2015). His novels typically deal with relationship problems, emotional dramas and the traumas of men and women in our time. He describes his writing as 'Men Lit', as opposed to the female 'Chick Lit'. Background Born in Romford, Essex (now Greater London), he was the only child of working-class parents. He lived for the first five years of his life in a rented flat above a shop in Essex, before his family moved to a council house in Billericay, Essex. His father was a former Royal Naval Commando who won the Distinguished Service Medal during the Second World War. After the war he worked as a lorry driver, market trader and greengrocer. His mother was a school dinner lady. Parsons attended Barstable Grammar School, Basildon (now Barstable School), which he left aged 16 with five O-levels. He worked in a series of low-paid, unskilled menial jobs before gaining employment with National Mutual Life, a city insurance company, as a computer operator. His free time while working there allowed him to develop his literary skills, and he published an underground paper called the Scandal Sheet. Career In 1974 he began work at the Gordon's gin distillery on City Road, London, where he developed an acute gin allergy and wrote his first novel, The Kids, published by New English Library in 1976. Parsons later said