Books of the week: Life stories to treasure

There are celebrities, and then there are national treasures: those precious few who, transcending mere fame, are taken to the collective bosom, where they rest in a fiercely protective layer of affection and presumptive intimacy. Like the royal family, they are not beyond criticism; but talking them down in public entails a degree of risk.

Three national treasures have just published autobiographies: Michael Parkinson (Parky), Dawn French (Dear Fatty) and Julie Walters (That's Another Story). Between them, they provide a handy primer on the dynamics of national treasurehood. Parky has the additional benefit of a photograph in which the master is surrounded by a clutch of NTs: David Attenborough, Michael Caine, Billy Connolly, Judi Dench and Dame Edna Everage, with future potentials Peter Kay and David Beckham. Jamie Cullum is there too.

First, the most direct route to becoming a national treasure is television: film stars hardly count; a long-running TV comedy is almost a guarantee. Most likely, it is to do with being a familiar sight in the living-room. Second, while national treasures must be in some respect extraordinary, they are also deeply ordinary. By definition, autobiographies are self-obsessed, celebrity autobiographies doubly so, and in Parky's case the frequency of the first-person singular becomes at times downright oppressive.

But at the same time, they are forever shrinking into the crowd, accentuating what they have in common with the rest of us. While upper-crust treasures do exist – the Attenboroughs, David and Richard, are the prime examples – by and large their backgrounds are humble. All three of our memoirists were working – or lower-middle – class: Parky's dad was a miner, French's an RAF NCO and an unsuccessful newsagent, Walters's – the poshest – a self-employed builder. Even a non-Freudian will note the dominance of fathers; in French's case, everything is complicated by her father's suicide, shortly before her 20th birthday. Although she claims that she has always been overweight, the photographs suggests that it was around then that the problems really started.

All three spend a good deal of time recapturing childhood experiences that verge on the banal – days at the seaside, family in-jokes, games with the neighbours' children, much-loved pets, their favourite music. Banality is, perhaps, the point, and sometimes strangeness is passed over with insufficient comment: French's maternal grandmother, for example, was evidently a mean drunk and a thief, and stays at her flat seem to have been traumatic, but French works hard to paint her as little more than quaintly eccentric.

Treasures aren't too clever, either (an exception is Alan Bennett, but he is helped by associations with Winnie the Pooh, Jackanory, and Thora Hird). Walters, on her own account, scraped into a selective school by the skin of her teeth, leaving to work at 16; French went to a public school, but the RAF paid most of the way, and since it was only a very minor institution she has never felt part of the big public-school club. Parky went to the local grammar, but insists at some length that it was a complete waste of time – an insistence which has, incidentally, cost him a great deal of goodwill in his native Barnsley.

The insistence on the lack of advantages of talent or social class shades quite often into chippiness. Walters at least has the insight to say that she is chippy, and make a joke out of it. Parky's Pythonesque attachment to his humble beginnings ("Cardboard box? You were lucky") and his almost ostentatious suspicion of public schoolboys and graduates are especially striking. My own parents came from almost identical backgrounds to his, in villages just up the road, and my father was a few years above him at Barnsley Grammar; but I can't recall them expressing anything like his resentment. Perhaps that's the difference – it's the chips on the shoulder that fuel the ambition.

The façade of ordinariness becomes harder to maintain as the narrative progresses to adulthood, and fame and material success begin to accumulate. Celebrity autobiographies can drift into name-dropping, and for good reasons. First, stories about famous names sell books – in Parky's case, the encounters with celebrity are what he's known for and the reason most people will fork out £20, though the less well-worn stories, about his early career in Fleet Street and the pioneering days of commercial television, are rather more interesting, at least to another journalist. Walters has the actor's instinctive aversion to leaving out any of the marvellous people who have made it all possible, but she's genuinely starstruck, still keen to brag that Michael Caine was her co-star in Educating Rita.

Second, celebrities are used to the exposure, while less famous friends may feel it is an intrusion. It's notable that French, who complains bitterly of the tactlessness of members of the public who won't allow her to get on with her private life, doesn't mention her best friend by name, referring to her only as "the BF". Elsewhere, though, her sensitivity to matters of privacy seems less well-developed – notably in the episode in which she describes examining her elderly mother's vagina for fragments of glass, after she has sat in a car with broken windows (her mother is still alive). The book is structured as a series of letters to friends and family (the Fatty of the title is Jennifer Saunders, not herself); some are quite cringe-making in their sentimentality, frankness or tactlessness. My advice to close friends of French's who want to stay that way is, get a third party to vet before reading. Walters halts the book at her daughter's birth, for which her now teenaged daughter will, no doubt, remain eternally grateful.

Perhaps the most important thing to note about national treasures is that, while they don't necessarily have to go the full Thora Hird and present Songs of Praise, they do have "traditional" values. It is possible, these days, for a NT to be gay, as long as not too flagrant; but few with a public history of shagging are likely to make the grade, and it's notable that Walters, Parkinson and French are all in steady relationships.

If you're contemplating putting any of these books in a loved one's Christmas stocking, and don't want to affect your own steady relationships, it's worth pointing out that Parkinson's is by some way the best written, though also the most abrasive; Walters is much warmer, and an adequate stylist. French's book is cleverly structured (and from the "Hoc feci" – "I made this" – on the fly-leaf, I assume she, not a ghost, gets the credit), but her coy, would-be comic style is excruciating, and I would honestly rather have a drawing-pin in my foot than read certain passages again. But since she is a national treasure, you never heard me say that.