Negative Feedback: British blokey jokey comedy that sees the residents of a Birmingham tower block take on the world of television and celebrity in a slapstick free for all that almost ends in tears!

by Eddie Lancaster

Jasper and Annie are a pair of jobless no-hopers who have dropped into the cracks between the paving slabs of life. Rather than bothering to climb out, they have embraced their situation and created a life based around doing pretty much nothing. That is, apart from visiting various chronic illness clubs for free refreshments and selling old cassette tapes online. But when a customer leaves negative feedback for a month-old purchase without first making contact, Jasper seeks retribution.

Bernd Tost is a wise old German punk who lives on the top floor and is reputed to have been a Stasi agent during the Cold War. Together, they form the Negative Feedback Retribution Squad and discover they have a talent for striking a comical blow for the little people. When their first mission is a massive success, they decide to advertise their services online. What follows is a series of increasingly elaborate revenge windups involving television celebrities, politicians, pop stars and even the clergy. Until predictably, they bite off far more than they can chew, and things take a sinister turn. All set against the story of Bernd's former life and exactly how he came to be living at the top of a tower block in a little Black Country town called Oldbury.

314 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2020

About the author

I was born in one of the small towns where Birmingham collides with the Black Country, making me a ‘Yam Yam’. I write comedy novels aimed mainly at my own generation, for folks who enjoy a laugh and don’t take life too seriously; anyone from toilet readers to bored van drivers and those poor souls sitting in a doctors waiting room hoping it’s not bad news. Plots as thin as cigarette paper, held together by a thousand dad gags. Vintage humour from a time before everyone got offended by everything and the difference between a joke and an insult was the expression on the face that said it.

My influences are the ‘golden years’ of film and television - Bless This House, George and Mildred, Carry-On, Man About the House, and more recently, Still Game, Bottom and The Young Ones. There’s a smattering of bad language and the odd knob gag, but very little sex, mainly because I think you have to be good at something in order to write about it! So I usually concentrate on characters who are skint and use them to poke fun at things I probably shouldn’t, subjects I know a lot about, to laugh at a time when life isn’t very funny…

Reviews

[Sally George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny and enjoyable read. The characters are people all around us with spot on descriptions. I liked the chapters giving the backgrounds of the characters too. It reminded me a little of the "Thursday Murder Club" books but with young amusing people rather than the elderly yet equally as hilarious.