The Story And History Of Bristolian Talkin' Tom

The Professor of Bristolian has written an unpublished book entitled An Englishman In Nuoro (A Bristolian In Sardinia). The following extract is from a chapter that tells of the background to, and the story of, the popularity of Bristolian Talkin' Tom:-

Chapter Eighteen                  Bristolian Talkin’ Tom

In Chapter Four I wrote about my appearance as a Professor of Bristolian in the DVD “Terry’s Bristolian Language Lessons” and how shortly after the DVD came out in November 2010 I created a Professor of Bristolian Facebook page. I also mentioned how a few years after I created the page its popularity really took off as a result of something that I could never have foreseen. When I first started the page I just posted links that I thought were quite informative as well as being amusing and that had references to the Bristol accent and dialect. Anyway, after about 18 months I must have had just about 100 followers. I actually thought that was quite good. However, when Facebook introduced their new algorithms, which meant most of my posts reached no more than about 20 people, it was quite discouraging. This continued for quite some time and, to be honest, there were times when I wasn’t sure whether I could be bothered with continung. So what happened? Well, one day I had the daft idea of doing a map of the world with as many countries as possible spelt the Bristolian way. It was quite easy to find a blank map of the world online and then, using Photoshop, spell countries in the gert proper Bristolian way. It was in May of 2014 that I posted The Bristolian Map Of The World  to my Facebook page and it reached about 500 people, which was a lot more than usual. “So why not do a Bristolian Map Of Bristol (with the different districts written in Bristolian)?”

I thought to myself. I actually wondered if I'd lost my mind while I was preparing the Bristolian map, especially as my wife was watching her favourite Italian football team, Cagliari FC, on Sky Sports TV at the same time (and, as I’ve already written, I’m extremely into football!) Anyway, posting the Bristol map to my page, just three days later, was the turning point. It reached 56,000 people! And the number of followers jumped from from about 130 to about 700 in quite a short space of time. I was able to sustain interest in the page by updating the maps now and again and posting lots of photos of real people, aliens and animals saying silly stuff in broad Bristolian by virtue of the little bubbles I attached to the pics. And so the Professor of Bristolian Facebook Page became both an extremely silly and extremely fun thing to do.

Nevertheless, the upsurge of interest after posting the maps with all the places written in Bristolian was nothing compared with what happened a few months later, at the end of October 2014. One evening Jessica, my stepson Pierpaolo’s girlfriend, showed me an application that she had on her I-phone - a Talking Tomcat that repeated anything you said out loud. Having experimented with my best Bristol accent I was extremely impressed with the results; in fact I was practically peeing myself from laughing! Maria Rita and I didn't waste any time. We both downloaded the application on to our phones, especially as it looked as though you could record short videos using the application. It didn't take me long to work out how to do it and within a few days I had made four “Bristolian Talkin' Tom” videos, first uploading them on to Youtube and then on to my Facebook Professor of Bristolian page. However, when I tried uploading them directly on to Facebook they seemed to reach far more people. In fact it went absolutely crazy! All of them had reached well over 10,000 people and had been viewed by thousands in just a few days! One video, about the Bristolian Tomcat's encounter with an old lady he met in Crow Lane, Henbury in Bristol (a street very close to where I grew up), reached almost 200,000 people in a very short space of time and was viewed amost 60,000 times!

In just over a month the number of followers had jumped from about 780 to over 5,000! There were loads of comments (nearly all positive) and requests (and it took me quite a while to respond to each and every one of them) to the point where I almost felt under pressure to create a new Bristolian Talkin' Tom video every day!

I had never intended to do more than a handful of such videos but with so many comments from followers saying that they found them hilarious and to “keep them coming!” I felt obliged to carry on. In fact, for quite a while I did do a video every day and crazy ideas just seemed to appear in my head from nowhere. It helped that the application allows for a multitude of changes of clothing as well as changes of furniture in the little house or flat that he inhabits. My Bristolian Talkin’ Tom had a flat in Henbury, a district that played a very large part in my formative yaers. So there was an opportunity to dress this animated cat in everything from a white suit with fedora and shades to a superhero costume combined with a viking helmet and zombie eyes.

 

 

Furthermore, there was the option to furnish his home in a variety of ways, including the classic Christmas and Halloween treatment, so as you can gather I was quite quick to seize on to the comic potential of all this.

 

 

Many years earlier I had been one of the driving forces behind a series of pythonesque pantomimes, all of which I wrote or co-wrote and I also took a leading part in each stage production, most performances of which took place at the Newman Hall in Westbury-on-Trym. There were titles like Dick Whittington Down Under and  Robinson Crusoe In Tibet and a feature of most of them was the fact that we tried to combine the rather surreal humour, made so popular by the comic television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with the comic aspects of an exaggerated Bristol accent. Every show was very well received, especially our finally production Robinson Crusoe In Tibet in which we had the Dalai Lama speaking in an extremely broad Bristol accent. I always remember how after that show I asked my friend Keith, who was in the audience, if he enjoyed it. “Yeah, not half!” he said. “Fucking mad wasn’t it!” It was the greatest compliment he could have paid us all. I actually renewed contact with two members of the cast of that final show, Clare and Sally, through the Professor of Bristolian page, and they with each other. None of us had been in touch for years!

Just as I felt a bit of the Monty Python spirit had entered us all when we did those pythonesque pantomimes all those years before I now felt that something of the same spitit was entering me as I was developing the character of Bristolian Talkin’ Tom. I would go to bed sometimes and start giggling at a new idea I had dreamed up for another video. Maria Rita used to say, “Oh my God! I think I’ve lost my husband to an animated talking tomcat!”.  With English not being her mother tongue it was sometimes hard for her to understand the Bristolian flavoured humour. And Caterina said to me one day, “Geoff, sono un po’ preoccupata per il tuo salute mentale! Hai messo molte cose strane su Facebook ultimamente!” (Geoff, I’m a bit worried about the state of your mental health. You’ve been putting some strange things on Facebook lately!”) Maria Rita responded with: “Sono questi Bristoliani! Sono pazzi!” (It’s these Bristolians! They’re mad!).

One thing that did surprise me was the number of requests I got to do short videos for people’s birthdays. I thought, “this is weird. It’s a bit like being a radio DJ!” Anyway, I obliged every time (I think) and it was quite curious what it led to. I found myself exchanging comments with former HTV news reader Sam Mason, after I had received a request to do a video for her (but not for her birthday),

and also with Nick Day, the continuity announcer for Bristol Rovers Football Club and occasional presenter on BBC Radio Bristol. Nick actually offered Bristolian Talkin’ Tom a gig when he was doing the early morning show on Radio Bristol in the summer of 2015. So for several weeks I e-mailed him an MP3 of Tom speaking in eloquent and comical Bristolian for 45 seconds, Every MP3 was subsequently broadcast on the show he was presenting. However, the request that really took me aback, once I had worked out the in-law connections, was one I received from another lady named Claire in November of 2015. She asked me to do a video for her daughter Hannah Weller whose thirtieth birthday was coming up. She told me how Hannah had grown up in Patchway, Bradley Stoke and Yate but now lived in London with her husband Paul and their twin three-year-olds. She also told me how Hannah liked to sing and travel and how the family were away in Spain at that precise moment. So I did the video wishing Hannah a Happy Birthday with Tom singing a couple of lines from the song “Y Viva Espana” with new and rather silly words that I had composed. The tomcat was dressed in a spacesuit and a jester’s hat and I played with the fact that the standard Bristolian pronunciation of Paul and paw is identical. “I bin finkin’”, said Bristolian Talkin’ Tom.

“ You got your Paul ‘n I got me paws anneye but thees cassen’t see me paws at the minute cuz I’m dressed a bit weird inneye!” (For the unenlightened a translation would be as follows: “I’ve been thinking. You’ve got your Paul and I’ve got my paws but you can’t see my paws at the moment because I’m dressed in a rather weird way aren’t I!”) After I had posted the video and Hannah had seen it she thanked me and her mum for “the best birthday present ever” on my Professor of Bristolian twitter page. When I looked at her own twitter page I noticed that she had thousands of followers, which surpised me seeing as I had never heard of her before, and I also noticed that in the small picture of her and her husband that he looked a lot older than her. But I still hadn’t put two and two together. However, whenever I logged on to twitter afterwards there was always the suggestion that I should follow the account of Paul Weller News, an account run on behalf of Paul Weller the musician. At first I just put this down to coincidence, the fact that they had the same name, kowing how these electronic suggestions work. But then a couple of days later the penny dropped when I looked more closely at the photo of Hannah and her husband. It was the Paul Weller, the very famous musician, singer and songwriter who had sold millions of records as the driving force with 70s and 80s bands The Jam and The StyleCouncil and then ever since as a solo artist. To be honest, had I realised before I made the video I probably wouldn’t have made anything so delightfully silly. I wouldn’t have wanted Paul Weller to think what a prat I was! But talk of six degrees of separation! In the English speaking world it would seem to be even less. When I related all this via e-mail to my friend Simon, who’s a great Paul Weller fan, he responded by reminding me about John, a guy I worked with for many years, who had got to know The Beatles as a result of being the singer with a Bristol sixties group called Chet And The Triumphs. They had supported the fab four at the Bath Pavillion in June 1963.

With the Bristolian Talkin’ Tom videos I tried to be funny without being too controversial. Tom was the mogfather, the fashion god of the feline world; 

he was the feline Messi on the football pitch; he was a feline musician with his band Massive Wurzel Attack and their song Unfinished Cider Symphony and he was also a feline Elvis impersonator.

 

 

He banked at HSBC in Westbury-on-Trym, the Henbury and Southmead Bank for Cats and he ate roast mousemeat. He displayed his feminine side from time to time as well as his thespian side when appearing in the feline productions of Shakespeare’s plays Romeo And Julie-cat and As Thee Likes It. 

All that aside, I must confess that I did use Tom to poke fun at the Mayor of Bristol, George Ferguson, and I felt a little guilty about it as I’ve heard that on a personal level the Mayor is quite a nice man. I do think, however, that his approach to solving Bristol’s traffic and transport problems is

far from being the most  pragmatic. On recent visits to Bristol with Maria Rita I have found the traffic and the parking an absolute nightmare and it’s obvious that trying trying to force car drivers to change their behaviour isn’t going to work without a vastly improved and better coordinated public transport system for the city. On one occasion we were wanting to have lunch in Clifton Village but on that particular Saturday we ended up in Westbury-on-Trym instead! My wife adores Bristol, and always looks forward to returning, but on those occasions when we have had to take the bus around the city she has been left less than impressed by the fact that three or four times we were waiting for scheduled buses that never arrived! However, she was amused one day when we were out in Bristol and I was saying how the authorities were trying to discourage car driving into the city centre as much as possible. Speaking in Italian I confused the word for discourage (scoraggiare) with the word for fart (scorreggiare) so that what I actually said was as follows: “They want to fart car drivers from going into the city centre.” I realised almost immediately what I’d said. Anyway, the word scorreggiare has a sound which is much too lovely for the function it describes. Fart is far more appropriate! I actually did one Bristolian Talkin’ Tom video in which he claimed to have sorted out Bristol’s transport problems by suggesting that there should be more significant investment in the local rail network and the introduction of three or four circular bus routes. While I might feel a little guilty about my treatment of George Ferguson I don’t feel any guilt whatsoever about using Bristolian Talkin’ Tom to have a go at Katie Hopkins. Anyone who has a media career which thrives on being unpleasantly provocative and confrontational, and makes a significant amount of money in the process, is a complete parasite as far as I’m concerned and deserves every bit of antipathy that comes their way. 

I did try to steer clear of politics with Bristolian Talkin’ Tom as far as possible because I was aware of how sensitive an issue it was and I didn’t want to alienate any of my followers. However, during the run-up to the 2015 General Election, and for a little while afterwards, I thought it would be fun to make Tom the leader of the Cat Political Party and the feline inspiration behind the Bristol cats’ march against catsterity in London. Naturally, he subsequently complained against cuts to Cats’ Credits for the poorer cats and the lack of interest in cat issues that infected Westminster.

I never expected to be still doing the Bristolian Talkin’ Tom videos over a year after I had started them. I had experimented with one or two of the other Outfit 7 “talking” applications, the most successful of which has been Bristolian Father Christmas, but Bristolian Talkin’ Tom remains the most popular feature on the Professor of Bristolian facebook page. It came as something of a surprise when, at the beginning of December 2015, I had an idea for a new video and I discovered that the video recording option had been removed from the application. Outfit 7 said that it was because of technical problems but I can’t help wondering if the story that broke in the press just afterwards, about how a complaint had been upheld against the company because of small children seeing obscene ads in the application, had rather a lot to do with it. The most offensive ads I had seen on it were ads, that I knew were fake, declaring that the phone had a virus. I have never been very interested in the gameplay aspect of the application and have never used it interactively. I just played two or three of the games as a means to an end: to extend the range of options I had in the making of funny videos. Earning “coins” from playing games meant the possibility of buying more “clothes” etc for Tom and making the videos even funnier. So what next? Well, when I was in Bristol in July 2015 my cousin Roger suggested pitching the idea of a Bristolian talking cat to AardmanAnimations. I thought it might be a possibility but when I looked into it I discovered that they don't accept unsolicited ideas.