Edinburgh International Book Festival: Neil Forsyth

Although he gained national fame in a recent TV adaptation (starring the actor Brian Cox, who also voiced the radio incarnation of Neil Forsyth's character), Bob Servant started life as an email address, created by Forsyth to provoke and enrage spammers, with hilarious results. “Who is the most famous Dundonian of all time?” asks the event's chair, veteran broadcaster Brian Taylor. William Wallace, perhaps? Desperate Dan? No, it is Bob Servant, man of the people, voice of Broughty Ferry.

The event starts with Forsyth reading what he describes as an “envelope of dynamite” from his fictional alter-ego. The document in question, Fifty Shades of Bob Servant, is an extended and chuckle-inducing parody of the EL James novel, with Servant out on the pull at his favourite spot for meeting ladies – a local supermarket. “She was married,” Forsyth begins, “and I was supposed to be at the bowling... I made a joke in the vegetable aisle and she laughed like a docker.” Bob's “saucy” stab at erotica is hilarious (“She peeled off a jumper to reveal... another jumper. 'That one's coming off too,' she said”) showing just how enduring and adaptable a character Forsyth has created.

Forsyth's banter with Taylor is supremely quick and witty, as it soon becomes apparent that a great number of native Dundonians have come down to Edinburgh to see him read. A series of bizarrely specific questions about Broughty Ferry are elicited from the audience: “Would Bob Servant eat chocolate violets from Goodfellow and Stevens?” Forsyth replies simply, “Yes.” And: “What's the best bus route in Broughty Ferry?” to which Forsyth says: “The 24 to Fintry.” These questions and answers are the key to the Dundonian humour with which Forsyth's books are suffused; a mixture of the banal and the ridiculous.

Actors Jonathan Watson and Victoria Liddell read from the original Bob Servant books, dramatising an email exchange between an alleged American millionairess with a tragic past, keen to donate 8 million to charity through Servant, and Servant himself. It culminates with Servant ministering to a new Church of Broughty Ferry, situated in the public toilets, much to the bafflement of the spammer. Words cannot do justice to the ridiculous comedy of the extract, with tears of laughter streaming from the eyes of many in the audience. 

Forsyth speaks about the regeneration of Dundee, and the success of Servant's TV outing, and seems keen to take the character even further. Given how versatile he has already proven, and the enthusiasm of the audience for more tales from Broughty Ferry, it seems like Bob Servant is here to stay – a character who even Forsyth treats as though he were a real person. Forsyth recounts a regular occurrence as he walks around the small town – residents approach him and say, “You must have known my father.”

It is “amazing how many people from Broughty Ferry think Bob Servant is their dad,” Forsyth laughs. Clearly, in creating Servant, he has keyed into a deep and abiding truth about the town, and about the Dundonian character.