Not Quite Done Yet! Hallam FM favourite James Crookes is back with fourth time-travelling book
Sheffield’s accident-prone time travellers are back – after almost destroying Band Aid and rewriting the 1980s, for one last chance to put history right in James Crookes’ fourth and final adventure, as he tells Graham Walker
What if two people from Sheffield travelled back to 1984 – and accidentally stopped Bob Geldof seeing the TV report that inspired Band Aid?
There would have been no Do They Know It’s Christmas? No Band Aid. No Live Aid.
Now, after a four-year wait, the fourth and final book, Not Quite Done Yet!, is published on Tuesday, September 29, and the Audible audio version is available now.
BUY HERE: All of his ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas Yet?’ books are available on Amazon – CLICK HERE.
LISTEN: Audio versions, narrated by James, are on Audible – CLICK HERE.
The time-travelling adventure once again begins and ends in Sheffield.
But this time it’s July 1985.
Dallas is unmissable, everyone knows a Rik or a Vyvyan, Air Mail can change a life and somebody has translated the year’s biggest UK chart hit into Spanish. A Smurf is going on holiday. A Wallace Arnold coach is on the wrong side of the road.
And Tash, Jamie, Raymond and Maureen have somehow become entangled in one final impossible situation - this time with Grandad Ernest along for the ride.
One last attempt to put history right leads to missing money, suspicious strangers, dangerous secrets – and yet more meddling with a past best left alone.
Warm, funny and full of unexpected emotion, Not Quite Done Yet! is a nostalgic British comedy about family, friendship, freedom – and finding your way home when home might not be where you left it.
Behind all the time-travelling chaos is a familiar Sheffield voice with quite a story of his own.
James is better known to thousands of South Yorkshire radio listeners as “Producer James”, who spent 21 years producing and appearing alongside Big John on Hallam FM’s ‘Big John at Breakfast.’
He published three books in three years – then disappeared from bookshelves for four.
A lot happened.
He told me: “In those four years I had cancer, moved house, watched my daughter get married and then, 15 months ago, the radio show I’d spent 21 years producing and being on air with disappeared and I was made redundant.”
At 55, after working continuously since leaving Sheffield Poly in 1989, suddenly there was no breakfast show to get up for.
“That last bit has probably been the biggest identity shift of the lot,” he says.
“The thing I’d always fitted around radio – writing books – suddenly needed to become the job.
”Meanwhile, readers kept asking the same question: when was he going to write another one?
“So, four years later, I finally have.”
The series has now clocked up around 90,000 sales, reads and listens.
And after everything that has happened – fictional and real – perhaps the new book’s title says as much about its Sheffield author as it does his time-travelling characters.
James Crookes, it seems, is Not Quite Done Yet!
BUY HERE: All of his ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas Yet?’ books are available on Amazon – CLICK HERE.
LISTEN: Audio versions, narrated by James, are on Audible – CLICK HERE.