QI, Series Four [D]

Stephen Fry:
Name, if you can, the subject of the three volume book whose first volume is entitled "The Long Years of Obscurity."

Phill Jupitus:
The career of Phil Collins.

Ronni Ancona:
Is this book about the word obscurity before it got famous? How it was beaten by its adjective father. And left on the doorstep abandoned by its mother, and it was the only noun growing up in a house of verbs. And the verbs were always going out doing lovely things, because they were doing words, and poor old obscurity was stuck inside suffering from asthma. And then after school it was surrounded by quotation marks and got beaten up terribly. And then one day entered into reality TV show and it became very famous and it was much in demand and used to describe all the people who leave Big Brother House?