The story of the Toppled Bollard is as inconsistent as its clientele.   If you have a desire to read through some of the stories from the past you will find characters come and go, the name of the landlord of our pub changes, and the features and nature of the bar are not exactly consistent.  We know.  We didn’t plan it this way – but somehow it just happened like that.  It isn’t really important. 

The main point is that each letter adds to the sense of amusement, and the overall feel that we are trying to develop for our company.  Each time we have a silly idea we try and use it.  One day the landlord is an Elvis impersonator.  The next he has a dog that speaks Greek.   Then we find him in prison and his fearsome wife is running the show.  Suddenly Ester Rantzen turns up.   There’s no logic and no consistency.  No one has ever complained except when I stopped writing them. 

In the winter of 2004/5 we decided to take the whole concept a little step further, and we introduced into the banter the notion of a new building, built alongside the Toppled Bollard itself – a nightclub called The Broken Glass.   There was no particular reason for inventing The Broken Glass, except that we had set up a couple of adventures (such as the G8 summit in which Johnny Prescott attempted to date Condoleezza Rice and she replied “I never date outside my species”) which clearly required a broader stage than the saloon bar of the Bollard.   Also I had recently written a song in the folk-rock idiom of the 1970s called “Broken Glass” (its just a hobby of mine and of no particular significance, but if you are really into the Bollard and all its oddities, I’ve reprinted the last 3 verses from the song elsewhere on the site).   

And this says a lot about how the Bollard stories come about.  I write about anything that comes into my head and which seems to have the promise of a spot of humour.   Some of the one-liners (such as the guy who invented the drawing board not being able to go back to anything when he got it wrong) are shamelessly adapted from the work of comedians whose bollard I am not worthy to topple.   Some of the stories – (like writing to the natural history museum because we found a Barbie doll on the site of the excavations of the new building, and wanted it classified as being of Martian origin) are apocryphal.    A few really are my own. 

A lot of the time the episodes take on a life of their own.  I can’t quite understand why I made the landlord’s dog speak Greek, or where the notion of being arrested in Penzance for writing adverts about the way Cornwall is run by ancient Mafia clans came from – but I suspect I read something somewhere that week which started a train of thought.   That was certainly the case with the tale of the lady who hunted Woolly Mammoths with a hair dryer – a tale in the Toppled Bollard mode which actually didn’t feature the pub at all.   The Woolly Mammoth story rang a bell with huge numbers of people, and it is still worth looking at – not because it is well-written but because it worked so well as a sales letter. 

The story itself is simple.   The writer finds that he is having a hard time of it at parties because whenever anyone asks him what he does for a living he gets a lot of abuse when he says “I write direct mail”.  Then he meets a lady at a party who tells how she hunts Woolly Mammoths in Siberia and then defrosts them with a hair dryer, and the writer decides that he is going to have to change his tune if he ever expects to be a hit at parties. 

The story is also untrue – nothing like this has happened to me, and I don’t seem to have too many problems talking to people at parties.   But the part about the lady and the mammoth is true – I saw it on a programme on Channel 5 one evening, and wrote the piece the next day.     

And that is the clue really – once one has a theme to write about, the ideas come very easily, because they are simply adapted from everyday life.  I have the notion of a pub at which the rich and famous mix with the dissolute members of the East Midlands advertising industry.   One day the landlord was reinvented as an East End gangster who also happens to be an expect on direct mail.  Wild and violent behaviour in the midst of debates on direct marketing is commonplace.   That is the setting.  All I have to do each time I want another Toppled Bollard letter is take something from everyday life and write it a bit larger and a bit sillier.   As long as the person I am poking fun at most of the time is me, few people get upset, and most people seem to like it. 

Which I suppose brings me back to the Broken Glass.   I am writing this on New Year’s Eve 2004, having spent yesterday evening watching “The Producers” in Drury Lane.  My mind is buzzing with the brilliance of the show and the sheer bad taste of every second of the performance.   Maybe next week that will be the theme of the next Bollard sales letter – or maybe something else will have cropped up. 

It doesn’t really matter too much what the next episode is, because by and large the theme works.   Of course I have to try and make each letter amusing – and a number of the pieces I write do get rejected – and all of them do get a number of re-writes.  But the theme is there – and that is what works.