Was Ben Hatch destined to become a writer?

Maybe. He was certainly destined for selfemployment, although it took a string of disastrous jobs for him to realise it.

“I think I was sacked from around 30 jobs,” he says, slightly proudly.

I should probably claim this is hard to believe looking at the successful 40-something sitting opposite me in his lovely Hove semi. But that would be a lie. In truth it’s easy to imagine Hatch, with his unruly hair and frequent giggles, failing to toe the corporate line.

Lasting two or three months in employment was a grand achievement for the young Hatch. He managed to get sacked from a job selling advertising for The Independent before he’d even started when his letter of acceptance was deemed unacceptable.

Head of advertising Adrian O’Neill had been chummily addressed as “O’Neilly”.

“I think I wrote ‘Cheers for the job’ too,”

says Hatch, dissolving into laughter.

He was let go from McDonalds after failing to put the prescribed amount of lettuce in a burger and was released from another fastfood chain for turning up for work in a cheese-splattered, sauce-stained apron. Luckily, he had a fallback plan.

“I set myself up as a private investigator,”

says Hatch, and by now I’m also spluttering at his audacity.

“Someone told me you didn’t need any licence or qualifications so I just put an advert in my local paper with a picture of a magnifying glass and my parents’ home phone number.

“My poor mum had to take all these calls and would be shouting, ‘Benjy, there’s a man on the phone who wants you to follow his wife. Can you get out of the bath?’”

It’s perhaps telling that Hatch eventually found his niche in journalism, embellishing the news at a series of local papers in Buckinghamshire and Leicester before publishing his debut novel, The Lawnmower Celebrity, which was recently rereleased as The P45 Diaries.

Centred on delusional, work-shy Jay and his despairing BBC executive father, the book marked Hatch’s first forays into fictionalising his own life.

It wasn’t quite ficitionalised enough for his father, the acclaimed BBC radio producer Sir David Hatch, who remarked that the book should probably have been titled Dad, Don’t Sue.

A member of the Cambridge Footlights, his father had begun his career working with the likes of John Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke- Taylor on radio comedy Sorry I’ll Read That Again, and worked his way up to Head of BBC Radio.

Although he could be distant, and had limited patience for his son’s slacker tendencies, humour was the glue that united father and son.

“You could get out of anything you’d done wrong if you could make him laugh,”

says Hatch, recalling an incident where his father caught his underage son bribing a tramp to buy him booze at a supermarket.

“I gave the tramp £20 and he went into the shop and straight out of the back door.

Dad saw it all from the car but when I had to explain myself I threw in some details to make him laugh and defused it.”

It’s a technique that has gone on to serve him well as the author of humorous travelogues including Are We Nearly There Yet? and The Road To Rouen, which detail Hatch’s chaotic, overheated and occasionally dangerous road trips through England and France with his wife Dinah and their two children Phoebe, nine, and Charlie, six.

Initially commissioned to write for guidebook specialists Frommers, it soon became apparent that, once again, Hatch wasn’t entirely fulfilling the brief.

“I kept on putting too much personal detail in. In a review of Leeds Museum, I suddenly mentioned I had a kidney stone. Frommers kindly put me in touch with an editor who was interested in travelogues.”

Hatch insists he doesn’t consciously put himself into hairy situations but he certainly doesn’t avoid them and why would he?

His encounters with deathcults and violent donkeys make for entertaining reading, although one wonders if Hatch’s wife, like his father, minds so much of their family life being dissected in print.

He is mercilessly honest, even detailing the near-breakdown of their marriage in The Road to Rouen.

“I think the funniest episodes are often the ones when things are genuinely out of control and, at the time, don’t seem remotely funny.”

Still, Dinah proves perfectly capable of exacting her revenge as the family’s only French-speaker.

“I don’t speak any French but thought the trip would be fine because Dinah does. But she used it as a weapon if I was out of favour.

I’d ask for steak and end up with calf’s liver.”

This was on the rare occasion they went out for dinner, of course.

Usually, as his readers know, Hatch prefers to feed his family on food pilfered from hotel breakfast buffets.

He was proudly pictured in the Daily Mail as “Britain’s Stingiest Dad” when he explained clever techniques such as strapping baguettes to his children’s legs to avoid “extortionate” charges for food in Disneyland, and claimed that Phoebe and Charlie were thrilled to receive nothing more than a giant cardboard box as a Christmas present.

But he’s got nothing on his late mother, he says, a woman who would regularly tuck leftover baked beans in subsequent meals and who took in ironing despite being married to the Head of BBC Radio.

“Mum used to make my dad go over to collect people’s laundry in his chaffeur-driven car,” grins Hatch.

“He’d come home from a meeting with John Humphries on the Today programme clutching a bag of someone else’s crumpled shirts.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t a love of ironing that fuelled their mother’s behaviour and, before she died in 1997, she presented Hatch and his two siblings with a cheque for £20,000 each from the money she had squirrelled away over the years.

While his mother sadly didn’t live to see the publication of Hatch’s first novel, his father had been dreading it for months.

“When I came to rewrite it recently I was reminded of how pompous I had made the father although in reality, my dad wasn’t remotely pompous.

“But of course everyone thought it was him and I couldn’t help thinking of him reading it and imagining that that was how I saw him.”

But his father loved the book, keeping it on his desk at all times.

“I always wanted to make dad proud of me and I felt it wasn’t good enough to work in a bank.

I felt deep down he wanted me to do something creative.

“I think in the end he was just relieved I’d done something.”

* The P45 Diaries (Kindle, £3.99) and The Road to Rouen (Headline, £11.99) are out now