All you knead is dough: Barney Farmer

Long-time Viz contributor and author Mr Barney Farmer will seek to explain – to himself as much as anyone else – how he came to spend the entire 21st century thus far thinking about a pair of semi-functioning alcoholic craftsman bakers in a small-town bakery perennially on the cusp of collapse.

In the course of this plea expect to learn something about how life bleeds into fiction, how that fiction in turn bleeds back into life, and how, given enough time, it becomes ever harder to tell the bleeding difference.

Put otherwise, the evening will tell a story of how stories often grow, crumb by crumb, setting out from pure invention, expanding to become records of particular places and times, before gradually incorporating the autobiographical and ultimately the confessional.

Expect bawdy language, leavened somewhat by it being uttered in an intermittently unintelligible broad Lancashire accent.

Tickets are £5.00 for OAS members, £6.00 for non-members and £1.00 for children, should you wish to char their childhood.

Tickets can be purchased online in advance via TicketSource (with a small booking) or on the door if still available.

ABOUT BARNEY FARMER:
During his working life Barney Farmer, a citizen of Preston, Lancashire, has dug holes, filled shelves, mixed cement, humped bricks up ladders, thrown sacks of potatoes on pallets and served a lengthy sentence as a local news-reporter and journalist.

Alongside this wage-slavery he has, over the course of 30-odd years, contributed cartoon strips and comic prose to various periodicals, principally Viz, for whom he has written since 2002, but also stints for Private Eye and Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic. There have been many others, but in the name of retaining some dignity in his dotage Mr Farmer now prefers that this tawdry roster be swept under the carpet.

He has written three novels, Drunken Baker (2018), Coketown (2019) and Park By The River (2022), and been at work on a fourth for long enough now that the idea of ever completing it has acquired an ethereal, dreamlike quality.

The first of these novels was adapted for stage and presented at Wigan Old Courts Theatre in February 2020. Then this thing called ’The Pandemic’ happened along and that was the end of that (for now).

Barney is 56, divorced, and available – heavy-lifting excluded – at short notice. He spends most of his time pounding the pavements looking for fallen change and sitting in cafes hoping to overhear private conversations on the off-chance someone says something daft enough that he can sell it to someone else.