Since It Gives Me Great Pleasure first appeared in 1972 I have been heartened to hear from so many producers and performers, both amateur and professional, how useful they have found it as a source of help, information and encouragement and above all of inspiration for their own ideas. For this is very much a suggestive publication, if you'll pardon the expression, the intention being to fire the imagination, to suggest a course of procedure rather than to proclaim an ex cathedra list of inviolable do's and don't's.
And now my estimable publishers have permitted me in this new edition to update publishers' addresses, to revise the text in the light of a further fifteen years' Music Hall experience, and considerably to expand the Chairman's section."
Michael Kilgarriff