Review: Caitlin Moran Live, How To Be Famous, York Theatre Royal

NOW that's what I call music to the ears, when former teen pop writer Caitlin Moran plugged her paperback release at this sold-out Penguin Live chatshow.

The Times journalist, feminist cultural commentator and autobiographical author , now 44, holds nothing in, including her post-babies belly that she flashed as a way of breaking the iceberg.

Caitlin had a host by her side, ostensibly steering the night's passage, but she is such a force of nature, such a torrent of indiscreet humour, insight, irreverence and sassy wit that the co-pilot pretty much took a back seat.

The audience was dominated by women, some of Caitlin's age, plenty younger, but how beneficial it might have been for men to have heard her too.

Women are advancing, held back for so long, but now experiencing a world of #metoo, the best TV being made by women; the most interesting musicians being women, says Caitlin.

Men are stuck, where they always have been, with their sport, three choices of trouser colour, not progressing, in need of talking to each other about how they feel, where they might be heading. If no man will write about it it, in two years' time, she will do so herself: How To Be A Man, the Caitlin Moran way.

She talked of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll; Benedict Cumberbatch and Blur; deoderants' alternative uses and urging men to give men flowers. She rued London becoming too expensive; revealed her aversion to men in hats, or with the complete works of The Fall or Betty Blue posters; and sought solace from climate change in her new love of the New Scientist. "May the geek inherit the Earth," she said. So many thoughts, so crisply expressed; nous amid the constant bad news around us.

She is busy, busy, busy: on her laptop was her new book in progress (How To Be) More Than A Woman; her film adaptation of How To Build A Girl will be out next year.

Caitlin Moran is a fabulous, fruity, funny storyteller, a provocative forward-thinker, so full of energy she was still dishing out hugs and signing books an hour afterwards.

Charles Hutchinson