That’s Bollocks!: Urban Legends, Conspiracy Theories and Old Wives’ Tales
by Albert Jack
Penguin Books, £12.99 (hb), ISBN 0 140 51574 7
…You said it, pal. You know Christmas is coming when sorry accumulations like this appear. Albert Jack has mostly cobbled together bits from Fortean Times and tabloid “it’s a weird old world” columns. The rest of it has been culled from a few lazy sessions sticking terms like “urban legend”, “conspiracy theory” and “old wives’ tales” into Google and adding a smug tone to hold it together. The result is a rehash of generally familiar tales that he invariably fails to exploit fully, such as missing out the ending of the story about the man who blows himself up on the toilet then is dropped from the stretcher by laughing paramedics. He doesn’t even seem to understand what an urban legend is. A number of the items are tagged with “this is a true story”. An example is the story of how Jack Nicholson’s sister turned out to be his mother. Peculiar it may be, urban legend it isn’t. Whether Mick Jagger and David Bowie went to bed together is just showbiz gossip.
Then we have the man tying helium balloons to his deckchair, which obviously isn’t about Larry Walters who achieved precisely this feat in California in 1982 because Jack states that his version, about “Harry”, is unlikely to be true (though strangely Harry paraphrases Walters’ famous “a man can’t just sit around” remark ; now that is weird). When Jack gets on to the ‘myth’ of global warming, it becomes clear what he is – a pub bore with a word processor. Pitted against Gore, I know which Al I would put my money on. The biggest mystery is why Penguin produced a good quality hardback when its contents were the equivalent of chicken nuggets. Despite the declaration that this is a study of urban legends, it is just an undemanding bog book. If you want a proper survey of urban legends read Jan Harold Brunvand (Jack clearly has). If That’s Bollocks does well we are promised a follow-up.
Please don’t encourage him.
Tom Ruffles
