Like most people in the North West , I love Bolton comedian Peter Kay to bits. Believe it or not up to about four years ago I had never heard of him. No I had not been living on the moon ...I had been living in Canada and returned home briefly on a visit to hear everyone talking about him, People looked at me like I was from another planet when I asked who he was and began to load me up with DVDs of all of his stuff.
It was so refreshing to see such confidence and reality in a comedian and of course he is very likeable His catch phrases immediately became part of my vocabulary and I actually sang at the club in Farnworth where he filmed Phoenix nights...there's a message on the wall in the dressing room that says something like..''I died here too – Peter Kay'' a very comforting thought just before you are going on to try and entertain.
I happened to be walking down town in Manchester the day tickets went on sale for his appearance in The Producers and managed to get first class seats for the shows opening nigh for half the price a ticket for his 2010 tour cost. I remember when he walked on stage in full drag the audience went wild for about 5 minutes before he even delivered his first line and he played the part beautifully. Needless to say my respect for him went up even further after that and I looked forward to his career moving in a new direction.
Unfortunately he didn't and reading the reviews of his farewell tour it sounds like he should have.
But. maybe now he has enough money to live for the rest of his life without working if he so desired, he can get down to finding some special niche for his talents. Like Eddie Izzard he may head more towards acting or create another show as brilliant as Phoenix Nights. I hope so because from what I have read it sounds like he has had enough of stand up in the arena format. He has also broken all previous records in many categories, so he has nothing left to prove in that area and indeed in many others.
I left the UK again shortly after that night at The Producers and lived in Spain and then Denmark over the next 3 years.
While working a hotel in Salebrena in Spain I met a guy who was on holiday there and spent the week talking with him until dawn most nights. He had that same likeable quality as Peter has , but his humour was much more off the wall and out of the box. I asked him if he had ever thought about doing stand up and he told me he preferred to write and didn't really want to set himself up as a target. H e wanted people to read his stuff and make their own pictures and have a chuckle in private,
When it came time for him to leave I told him that if I ever returned to England I'd look him up and find a way to get his sense of humour out there in the way he described...giving people a private chuckle.
About a year ago I returned to the UK to try and ''get back to my roots''. My goal was to gather together a bunch of talented people I had known for years and get some kind of coop together. People from different disciplines working together to create material that was as far away from the tired BBC, ITV mainstream as possible. My theory was ''If I'm sick of this crap'', there must be a large number of people out there who are thinking the same and with the internet it's just a matter of finding those people and asking them to help
I got in touch with the guy I'd met in Spain and we began to meet once a week at my flat' up int thills'. He was an ex ''olic' , that is, if you can abuse it he'd take it and he also suffered from schizophrenia - not the best choice of a business partner, you might think – but we found that we clicked on many levels and began to work on a project to take into the schools around Salford to use his experiences to warn kids from rougher areas about the consequences of substance abuse.
While working on this idea we did a video for a song we came up with. The song was called
“Where is my wonderful world' and we recorded it in my flat. We recorded the video there too and in the streets around where I live and ended up with something pretty decent considering it had cost us nothing but time and imagination.
We continued to follow the music path and wrote another song called ''This Beautiful Game '' which is about the corporate face of football. Every football fan who seer's it says ..''Spot on that's exactly what s wrong with the game today''.
Then one afternoon I said ''Right lets try something different'' He had always had the nick name of bury bobz so we decided to take the z off and make it Bury Bob and build the character around that.
We set the camera rolling....my little 5 year old Panasonic camcorder - turned down the lights and started talking. Very quickly Bob appeared. An opinionated scally with a very warped view of the world. I sat behind the camera and watched in amazement as ...the one who shall henceforth be known as Bury bob...came to life,
Over the next 3 months we had more of these sessions and uploaded them to You Tube and slowly but surely other characters began to appear , from Terry Bull. q list confidant, to Vladivar the eastern European subversive. We even have a pet cannibal called Canny Kenny Bull ,Terry's cousin.
Bob built a very strange website and over the last month we have nearly got it ready for visitors at http://www.burybob.com.though/ I still have about 4 hours of video to work through. A new vharacter turned up last week called Snood P whipper a Salford rapper and he already has a girlfriend called Chablaise.
I would really like to get to all those people who are sick of Saturday night pap and have an interactive site where people can send in questions for Bob and we can film the resulting session. It would be an interesting experiment in interactive internet improv comedy. (Try saying that after a few smokes...I mean pints)
We have also built up Bob's back story and now have a family history sketched out and have begun to involve other people, which was my original plan.
We have no wish to attempt to reach the commercial heights that Peter Kay has risen to, as that kind of fame seems to be self defeating creatively. I'm sure he had much more fun filming Chorley radio in a supermarket car park than having to live up to a reputation in front of 300,000 paying customers. And you know what we Brits are like...we love to build people up just to knock them down.
We intend to carry on working as a small tight knit group doing stuff that makes us laugh and having a bit of fun. Eventually we will be doing a full podcast with all the characters turning up and involving a larger group of friends and colleagues, but first we have to make a little money and we are relying on advertisers and donations for that as we would like to keep the site free for our users who need a laugh because they don't have any money or a job or a....don't let me go there, I don't want to have a rant.
We are also looking to help local good causes and I recently met a wonderful inspiring man called David Feldman from The Princes Trust group of charities and am hoping to be able to help in their goal to make Burnley rise from the ashes of despair and become the guiding light for inner city regeneration in the 21st century. They are doing wonderful things there in a very practical way.
So you guys have made one northern lad into a super star, our aims are much more modest, but our goal is the same as Peter's ...to bring a little sunshine and laughter into people's lives in these dark times.
So if you like the sound of Bury Bob and would like to have a private chuckle check out the website and register with us so we can keep you informed when we put up new stuff and to ask for your help with some deserving causes.
My name is Ian Jameson ...henceforth known as
Uncle Joe Bloggs
Love and peace and all that shit!
