For Richer For Poorer is the thoroughly enjoyable memoir of a life spent playing poker by the poster girl for all things BBC4, Victoria Coren. Who would have thought that such a memoir, written by a fully-fledged member of the BBC media classes, could be so engaging? The poker boom is already a few years old and tales of late night debauchery and fortunes won or lost are now ten a penny, yet For Richer For Poorer, although in many ways typical, manages to be both a breeze and something altogether more resonant.

This is because, despite being sister to one of television’s most irritating presences, Victoria Coren is a warmly funny and self-effacing host. Her story of the louche demi-monde of live poker is given real context by being structured around the story of her success in a million dollar tournament at the time of her father’s drawn out death. For Richer, For Poorer, unlike most poker memoirs is saying something about something.

Coren presents hers as a life lived on the margins. Gently instead of maniacally drawn to darkness, she is apparently unable to hold down a regular relationship, instead preferring the card table company of various waifs and strays. As she gradually acquires a surrogate family so do her poker skills develop. It soon becomes clear Coren prefers the rule-based parallel existence to the messiness of real life. As a counterpoint to her brainily wholesome BBC4 image, this works very nicely.

To be fair, it is only a partially drawn picture and Coren is surely not as much of the lonesome outsider as she makes out. When you work out what surnames the various Giles, Matthews, Martins and Johns belong to, you realise this is still a media luvvie’s life, albeit one that spends rather too much of  its leisure time holidaying on the outer fringes. Yet this is unfair as Coren is no dilettante poker player. She was in before the boom, mixing it with the degenerate gamblers of the Vic card room before poker had been anywhere near a TV screen. When poker did make it to TV, it was Coren who won some of the earliest televised tournaments. Indeed the structure of For Richer For Poorer is based around an account of the night in 2006 when she won $1m on the London leg of the World Poker Tour. She has earned the right to talk about this game and this life.

So much so, if anything For Richer For Poorer is an elegy for a time already passed. Although Coren and her friends have undoubtedly benefitted from the boom, they would all prefer it to still be as it was back in the day – a semi legal, semi dangerous late night life lived in parallel to the real world outside. But Coren is a better journalist than most and For Richer For Poorer is a human story. The bits about her dying father in particular are very moving.

Perhaps Coren overplays the innocent abroad schtick a tad, but what saves For Richer For Poorer is the way in which she is gently drawn to the darkside and away from the gentility of her background. It is as if Joyce Grenfell had rewritten the complete works of Martin Amis – which let’s face it would be a major improvement.

You can read an interview with Victoria Coren on our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.

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