“I
can tell you from a combination of personal experience and scientific fact, that
ten years old is the perfect and correct age at which to see Star Wars for the first time.” Although
this glorious memoir (subtitled ‘Growing up in the UK with an American Cultural
Phenomenon’) starts jokily, author and Star
Wars memorabilia-ist extraordinaire Phil Heeks may well be on to something.
Exactly ten years old when Luke Skywalker et al first came into his and the
lives of millions of other children, Star
Wars changed the author’s world, setting him on the road to become a
lifelong fan and collector of all things from a galaxy far, far away. For Heeks
– as for many of us – life can be divided into BSW (before Star Wars) and ASW (after Star
Wars), but few of us can detail, with as much wit and eloquence as Heeks
does, what it was actually like to watch Star
Wars for the first time and to have your universe changed forever.
As
a working class kid growing up in Stoke on Trent, raised on TV fare like Space 1999, Heeks first discovered Star Wars via the novelisation given to
him by his older brother and published months before the film came out in the
UK. At that moment he was already hooked, counting down the days to Sunday
March 5th, 1978 when Star Wars
opened at his local Odeon. So began the first in a series of agonising waits
for each new movie in the saga, while in-between films, to keep the Star Wars universe alive in his mind,
Heeks over forty years purposefully built up one of the largest private
collections of Star Wars memorabilia
around. Waiting for Star Wars tells
us the story of this growing obsession, the whys and the wherefores of
collecting, and the myriad pleasures of the movies themselves and the plethora
of soundtracks, toys, marketing materials and assorted spin-offs. What resulted
for Heeks has been a lifetime steeped in the sights, the sounds, even the
smells (Star Wars bubble gum cards
anyone?) of Star Wars.
Younger
readers who want to know what it was really like to experience the excitement
of Star Wars back in 1977 (before it
became The New Hope) – the tv
adverts, the merchandising, the cinema queues and the newspaper hype – need
look no further than Waiting for Star
Wars; while older fans will – through Heeks’ vivid reminiscences – get to relive
it all over again. So cue the Fox fanfare…
WAITING FOR STAR WARS / AUTHOR: PHILLIP HEEKS / PUBLISHER: BEARMANOR MEDIA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW 
