Charles Spencer was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph for 25 years, for most of that time serving as its theatre critic. He was named Critic of the Year in the British Press Awards in 1999 and 2008. For ten years he also wrote a column about pop music for the Spectator and remains an unrepentant fan of the Grateful Dead to this day.
After graduating with a degree in English from Oxford he began his career as a journalist on the Surrey Advertiserin 1976 and subsequently worked for the Evening Standard as a notably inefficient arts reporter, the theatrical trade paper The Stage, as a sub-editor and reviewer, and the late Robert Maxwell's London Daily News which went down with the loss of all hands in less than a year. After that debacle the Telegraph provided him with a welcome berth from which he retired in October 2014. During his 38 years as a journalist he reckons he wrote some 6000 reviews, ranging from Shakespeare to strip shows and everything in between.
His three comic crime novels, I Nearly Died, Full Personal Service, and Under the Influence were partly inspired by his happy and often inebriated days on The Stage newspaper and first published between 1994 and 2000.