Nina: (reading from newspaper cutting) ...Jimmy's porky pies hit the airwaves - that's great!...twelve grandchildren! Jimmy: Thirteen now, on New Years Eve! Twenty past eleven .... we just missed it (the Millennium Eve)... Nina: What did you think of the Hugh Grant looky likey that came third, what did you think of the young one from Sheffield? Jimmy: He's a nice chap, it takes some bottle to come up from there, on your own, with no support - what he did - he made a mistake, of um, he tried to do a magic show, got people up on the stage .. it's not the theme of it .....he lost it really.. I've got Howard on as well, I taped him. Karen: So it's been running for 25 years? Jimmy: It gives you some information... Simon: How did you feel when you'd won it, did you feel like you'd won the World Cup or something? The tension must've been really weird.. Jimmy: ..In a way it was just a daft thing... It's surprising to me that I won it , I couldn't believe it ... someone said "Go on!"... I always said I would go when I was contracting.... It started off when someone said we'll collect toys for Christmas, see? We decided to do more, so the joiners built this great big sleigh, we got about £5000 - everybody donated £10 off their wages, every man - this was a voluntary thing - then we put a charity thing on, then we were invited down, and we got the bosses down there.... Anyway, so I had done things then - I had done impersonations of everyone that was there...(Jimmy plays tape of his radio appearance, and passes round a book of his own poems)
Nina: So you did a bit of writing before you entered the Lying Competition? Jimmy: Since last summer I've wrote about 90 poems. I write what I see, I write a lot about the pit scene, the coal pits round here....The other day I watched a film about airplanes, I wrote this the other day, just by watching it on TV, the hurricanes and spitfires. My granddaughter's got a word processor, she types them up. Anna: I wanted to ask, James, what's that image? (reading brochure from last year's Lying Competition) Jimmy: That, is the giant turnip! If you read the back that was his (Will Ritson) first story - he hollowed them out to live in them, see... Nina: I notice the Queen is a recurring theme in your lies... Simon: The other thing that's interesting is Cliff Atkinson told us your story when we went to see him.... Anna: He told us the one about going round the world... Simon: He'd remembered it almost verbatim but there are slight changes in the story. He said it was a fantastic story. There are slight changes in the story every time it's told... Jimmy: ...one of the boilers blew, so I pulled into South Africa, put a pair of shorts on, and I cut through the boiler and cut through the funnel. When I got through, everyone sang "For he's a jolly good fellow", there was Nelson Mandela and I said "What's happening Nels?" ... Simon: The other thing that's reccurring (in the 'lies') is this thing with birds. Quite a lot of stories actually have birds in them. Cliff Atkinson told us this story about the Tizzy Wizzy...what was it? The eagle thing crossed with a hedgehog....
Jimmy: When I wrote the one about the ostrich I'd been watching a wildlife program and it said help save wildlife, so I sent £50. So I sent it off, thought no more about it. Then I get this telegram, "Could you be at Manchester airport, please bring your wife with you, it's important and probably a van, with plenty of straw in the back". I thought "What's going on here?", so I went , and I'd seen this African chief and the wife said "Oh, he's going to bring some tea, he's got a tea trolley" , and I says "It's not a tea trolley , it's an incubator!", and the chief says "This is yours". The wife says "What is it? Oh - It's an ostrich egg!". I says "So what are you going to do with that?" She says "It's yours, you'll have to bring it up and rear it. You have got to sit on it all the way home in the back of the van, you'll have to have 12 hours off and 12 hours on". It was terrible sitting on this egg, you couldn't go out, you had to work everything in shifts. The doctor was saying, "We're passing our James through the shell of the egg and sort of humanizing it", he said "Trust me". Anyway, I was sitting on the egg, the midwife was there see, and the shell starts cracking...she was mopping my head, then it went "Quack, quack quack", and she said "You've got a son!", and this things comes and it had a big long neck, it's the spitting images of the father you know.... I said it would cost me a fortune, I'll have to send it to school ..... I used to use it for hand gliding... ...... Karen: We thought our lies could be between five and ten minutes.....we're quite flexible... We haven't really decided what to do with them apart from this Festival which we're thinking about... Nina: Which would be a performance... And it might have a brochure that the lie might be printed in. Simon: So would you be interested in performing, in telling it? Jimmy: Oh aye! I'll have to come through one day.... Karen: We've really got to go! Anna: It might be really nice to have some exhibits (at the Festival)....maybe we could have props... Jimmy: You could have though! You could make some feet out of plaster casts.... If you went with that theme you could have Howard (Howard Christie, another Cumbrian liar who runs the pub where Cumbrian lying began with Victorian landlord Will Ritson)with a frying pan...some fancy hat or binoculars... Anna: The other thing is, do you feel like you need to know anything more about us or information about what we're doing here, or is there enough in the letter Karen sent you ? Jimmy: I understand what you're doing, aye.... do you want to wind people up?... Simon: Yes!... I have been involved before in hoaxes. I do things as art, its similar to what you do really, I've done things on the radio where I've said things about Stonehenge you know, about the world's oldest scratch card... Jimmy: Where are you going next? Anna: We're going to see John Graham ....
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