Britain’s Deadliest Handyman

Foreword: by Melvyn Bragg

Many of you will know Andrew Kane by another name, and for some of you even that name might have been hard to recall — until recently, at least.  

The year was 1998, and the BBC’s flagship home improvement show Changing Rooms was riding high in the primetime schedules. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was a household name, and Jim Parker’s alto sax and piano theme song was being whistled on building sites all around the country. And it wasn’t just the general public who were caught up in the buzz either: industry insiders knew that they were on to a hit, and no one was surprised when the show won “Most Popular Factual Entertainment Programme” at the 4th National Television Awards in October of the same year. Carol Smilie et al had dialled into the national zeitgeist: they had unearthed the potent need for renovation, a desire to make things better, to change rooms. (That Smilie had in 1998 also won the much-coveted “Rear of the Year” award only helped to cement the show’s innate cultural simpatico — you know, for the dads and that.) 

Underneath all of this glitz and glamour, however, something was rotten in the MDF state: a dark, maleficent force was at work, a jinxing and elusive liquidator without mercy or remorse — the very embodiment of evil, of all that was wrong with this godforsaken world.

That monster’s name, of course, was Handy Andy.

It took until 2005 for the awful details of Andrew Kane’s crimes to explode onto the front pages of the national press, but once they did, one knew that, as with 9/11, nothing would ever be the same again. That damnéd Cockney carpenter had gone and blown it all, throwing into chaos the spirit level bubble of our grand national narrative. 

Now is not the time to recount Kane’s many misdeeds, or the manner in which he was able to evade the authorities for so long. I leave that, of course, to Linda Barker, whose first-hand account you are about to read. That Barker could work alongside Kane for so many years without knowing the truth demonstrates the lengths to which he would go in order to conceal his crimes. Barker’s searing account is her way of saying that which couldn’t be said at the time; it is her potent rebuke of a man she once knew as a friend: that cheeky chappy dogsbody with a can-do attitude and a corrupted, iniquitous soul. 

This is important reading: a work of consequence and magnitude. Anna Ryder Richardson gave this book five stars out of five. Just let that sink in for a moment. That's maximum stars. Nowhere else to go. Top of the tree. 

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And with that, I hand over now to Linda Barker herself, and to her peerless novelised account of the events surrounding both the crimes and punishment of one Andrew Kane: Britain’s Deadliest Handyman.

(November 2021)