My friend was looking for a free sofa when one appeared on my street. I sent her a picture but pretended to critique it in the style of a pretentious London-based art critic who thought the tat on the street was sit-specific pop-up sculpture. Then I kept noticing them…
I was living in a rapidly gentrifying part of inner city Bristol where it was the norm for people to take flytipping to an extreme.
It started as private joke for a handful of friends in a Facebook group. This was 2014. It went low-key viral by mistake, as people joined in with their own commentary. The local press got involved, and it accidentally snowballed to something like 10,00 people. An arts trail exhibition and book launch followed.
It was a lot of fun, to be honest, and kept me sane whilst I was writing about real-world human rights abuses in my day job at the time. Satire clearly won’t work for all audiences, and it can be alienating for people who aren’t in on the joke.
I’ve ‘written funny’ for fanzines, magazines, and the BBC homepage where I managed to sneak in a line about ‘Kicking The Hobbit’ on the TV pages which sparked a debate about whether this was incitement to violence against hobbits.
Nick Raistrick 