Servant writer master of his own destiny

Why would the Beeb take a chance on an unknown writer from Dundee whose claim to fame was his football fanzine writing, in which he’d photocopy Roy of the Rovers cartoons and swap the words in the bubble for screaming invective directed against any team that wasn’t nicknamed the Arabs?

Forsyth, who’s set to release the third Bob Servant book adventure Ask Bob: Your Guide to a Wonderful Life, denies his career was propelled by pork-based chicanery – or worse. “No, it’s more a mix of luck, and being able and willing to take the opportunities when they come along,” he says, grinning.

Luck certainly played its part. But it seems the former Edinburgh University Politics graduate had put himself in the position to capitalise when opportunity knocked. Having progressed from fanzine to freelance football writer, one day Forsyth found himself choking on spam; not the luncheon meat than once filled our workmen’s pieces but the internet emails from the likes of Nigerian ‘Princes’ desperate to find a friend in Scotland who’d find a home for their spare $50m dollars.

Forsyth opened one email entitled Ignore This At Your Peril, laughed aloud, and then opened an account in the name of Bob Servant, a 62-year-old cheeseburger van operator in Dundee.

"I started off by wondering just how far I could push these spammers before they lost it, but I think they assumed that Bob had a mental illness and hung in there in the hope they'd get a fiver out of him at the end.”

This wasn’t a career move as such, but the writer had fun turning the tables on the spammers, the love (cash) lorn Russian prostitutes and the African fraudsters. And the emails came to form a series of magazine columns.

The columns became a book in 2007 and, helped by an endorsement from Irvine Welsh, three years later became a BBC Radio Scotland suggested a series.

Luck again came into the mix with the transfer to television. But again Forsyth ran with it. “I was in New York, attending a film writing course and writing a book at the time, and Dundee United were playing Rangers in the Scottish Cup. So I went to watch the game in a Rangers pub and got talking to this another United fan, a friend of a friend, and he asked who would be my dream actor if Bob were ever to be adapted onto television. When I said immediately ‘Brian Cox’. (Another Dundondian) this United fan said ‘I know Brian,’ who lived in New York.

“I thought I’d call this guy’s bluff and sent him a book which he said he’d pass onto Brian.”

Brian Cox didn’t read the book. It sat on a pile in his living room. But the actor’s son picked it up one day and took it into the toilet for a read. Cox heard him laughing – loudly - and read for himself to see what the fuss was all about.

That was lucky, of course. But it was all predicated upon writing a very funny book. And with Cox on board, BBC Scotland could back a radio series and a move to sitcom. Yet, the radio series had featured Bob and the spammers, now Forsyth had to come up with a new setting, and characters. The writer developed Bob into a local politician and created his devoted friend Frank (Jonathan Watson), the Sancho Panza to his Don Quxote, two Dundonians deigned with unrelenting idiocy.

But wasn’t the Bob Servant initial spoof idea a little, em, borrowed? After all, Willie Donaldson’s Henry Root had been writing hoax letters to people thirty-odd years before.

“I hadn’t heard of Henry Root until one day in the edit suite making the series,” says the writer, smiling. “Then I went off and read Donaldson’s books and found them really funny. But I then realised he didn’t originate the spoof letter either. The Lazlo Letters (comedian Bob Novello’s spoofs to celebrities) had also gone in that direction.”

Forsyth had given the idea new context and depth. But the emails weren’t his only success. Before Bob he wrote the biography of Elliot Castro, the story of the convicted Scots fraudster. Forsyth later sold the film rights to Other People's Money. Again, he had been lucky, this time in coming across the Castro story, but he created the writing opportunity by seizing the initiative and writing to Castro in prison.

Luck – and initiative – also kicked in on his honeymoon, three years ago in Italy with wife Rhiannon. “We planned to have lunch one day by the hotel pool, but all the tables were taking except for this one occupied by a middle-aged American couple.

“We asked if we could join them and the man turned out to be Darryl Frank, who is Head of TV at Dreamworks. We got on really well and I mentioned Brian Cox and the Bob Servant connection. I wasn’t aggressively pitching, but the next day Darryl came down and said he’d read Bob online and laughed. Then he asked if I had any other ideas – the Americans love ideas.”

It so happened Forsyth did and he pitched an idea for a sitcom called Every Other Saturday, the story of a divorced dad who only gets to see his son every second week.

Forsyth went on to pitch other ideas to TV networks in the States, sold two scripts and there are big hopes for a new idea he has set in a charitable institution. Meantime, Every Other Saturday is back on the front burner.

“There are people living in Los Angeles who make a great living selling scripts that never get made. The TV companies like to buy them just in case.”

BBC Scotland has dropped plans for a new series of Bob Servant, (the network couldn’t afford to back any more bondage and cheeseburger van stories.) Would America perhaps find Bob easy to swallow? “I’m going to have a crack at it,” says Forsyth, smiling. “It will be interesting to see if the TV demographic would suit a Mature Gentleman show.”

Will American audiences accept the underlying homoerotic subtext; Frank’s deep love for Bob and Bob’s deep enduring love for himself? “I didn’t think of that,” says the writer, laughing.

Forsyth, at 37, may now be a serious player in the American TV market, but he doesn’t live in Los Angeles. He lives in “twee” rural West Sussex. And he’s still working hard to make his own luck. “I’m up at six am, working six days a week, often until nine, ten at night when I get notes calls from one of the networks. I work alternate days on each show.

“I go into London one day a week and the States every couple of months. But life is great because I don’t live in a cramped London flat anymore. I’ve got an office at home and I’m not having to write with my pants drying over my head.”

And while Bob has passed away in his television life, in book form he is, it seems, immortal. “The idea for this book actually pre-dated the emails,” Forsyth reveals. “It goes back to my student days when I used to solve my friends’ personal problems using Bob as the voice. Ten years on, I was chatting to my agent and I suggested taking these pieces, and notes from genuine Bob fans, and compiling them.”

He adds; “I’ve really enjoyed doing this. Bob’s voice is on the page.”

Is it Bob’s voice – or the voice of Neil Forsyth? Is he the master of Servant, or is Servant an ever-lurking mischievous presence in his psyche?

“I used to think Bob was deranged but then I realised his is the voice that can’t be silenced,” he says, laughing. “And you’re right. It’s mine. When I write him it’s a case of slightly disengaging the brain.”

What’s clear is Neil Forsyth’s success is down to his delightfully wicked imagination. The school of thought people who reckon he’s capable of nefarious deeds are all dunces.

*Ask Bob: Your Guide to a Wonderful Life is being previewed at Glasgow’s Oran Mor on October 9 and Dundee’s Gardyne Theatre in Dundee October, 10 with Neil Forsyth, Jonathan Watson and Anita Vettesse appearing. Audience questions on Plato - or plates of chips - are invited.