10 Times Nottingham Folk Made National News for Stupid Reasons

WOMAN TRICKS SPEEDING DRIVERS WITH A HAIRDRYER

Fed up of boggers whizzing down her street, a woman in Hucknall gave drivers a shock by catching ‘em speeding… with her favourite hairdryer. By leaning over her garden fence and pointing at cars with the appliance, Jean Brooks managed to trick people into thinking she’d busted them with a speed camera. She came up with the idea after a family tragedy, and soon started basking in the sight of folk slamming down on their breaks. After the BBC caught wind of her unique idea, they made a video which racked up over 12 million views and turned her into a local celebrity.

VILLAGERS HOLD BIRTHDAY PARTY FORRA POTHOLE

Possibly the most passive-aggressive thing we’ve ever seen. Folk of Plumtree were gerrin' so fed up with the local council after they’d failed to fix a pothole, they fought back by throwing it a birthday party, complete with a Colin the Caterpillar cake. They even made sure to stick a couple of candles on top to properly commemorate the two years of trouble it’d been causing ‘em.

SHEEPDOG AND ORPHANED LAMB ELOPE

This one’s like summat out a Shakespeare play. After losing her mother at just a few weeks old, Bella the lamb struck up an unlikely friendship with a sheepdog named Blake, and the pair soon became inseparable. Their owner was devastated when the couple went missing from her home in Perlethorpe, so alerted the authorities and began one of the most extra pet hunts in Britain to date: CCTV cameras, "pet detectives", the Twitter campaign #findblakeandbella, and Philip Schofield offering up a £1,000 reward on This Morning. After three weeks, Blake was returned home, but unfortunately there was no sign of little Bella. A classic, tragic love story.

BLOKE FOUND HANGING UPSIDE DOWN IN UNI WINDOW

Two students were walking home at 3am after pounding the dancefloor at Pryzm, when they suddenly stumbled across a pair of legs waving out the window of NTU’s Arkwright building. After hearing distant cries, the lads went to investigate and found a man wedged in the window, hanging upside down. Instead of helping him out, they wept with laughter and filmed the bogger. The bloke had been stuck in this precarious position for five hours before the students called the coppers and he was carted off in handcuffs; in the end it turned out to be a homeless man looking for shelter, and all charges were dropped.

GOTHAM GO HAM AFTER BEING TOLD THEIR ADDRESS DOESN'T EXIST

By now, you’ll all be well aware of the links between owd Notts and Batman. For a long time, the residents of Gotham felt blessed that Bob and Bill took inspiration from their little town for their mega-successful comic. That was until one local resident called Rushcliffe Borough Council asking for sandbags, only to be told that the only Gotham they could find was the superhero’s home of Gotham City in New York. The convo got pretty heated and despite her best efforts, she still couldn’t convince the fella she weren’t prank calling him. You can’t win ‘em all, duck.

MACAULAY CULKIN BOOED OFF ROCK CITY STAGE

Things got slightly rowdy when Macaulay Culkin – that little tyke from the Home Alone films – and his band The Pizza Underground came to Notts in 2014 to play Dot to Dot. The band parody classic songs from The Velvet Underground by changing lyrics to summat a bit more cheesy and pizza-related. Take A Bite of the Wild Slice, for example. Your lot just weren’t vibing it; you drowned ‘em in beer, interrupted Culkin’s kazoo solo, and the band stormed off after just fifteen minutes. 

WOMAN PARKS CAR ON TRAM TRACKS

It was a typical Friday morning in Nottingham. A woman was running late to meet her mates at Costa, so slung her car in the first "space" she could find: on the tram tracks outside NTU. After a fifteen-minute standoff, a bunch of pissed-off tram travellers banded together to lift her Mini off the road while she sipped away, oblivious to the chaos outside. Half an hour and a latte later, she emerged to find two stacked-up trams, a crowd of rowdy students and a hefty parking fine. The incident even trended on Twitter under the hashtag #TramVSCooper. After all the commotion, the woman was overheard telling community officers that she weren’t from Notts, so had no idea the damage she’d done.

WOMAN CALLS 999 TO ASK HOW TO STORE EGGS

For Gawd's sake. Our ambulance services are strained enough already, and they definitely don’t need your lot wasting their time with your poxy poultry questions. As part of their campaign to raise public awareness of how to properly use the emergency line, East Midlands Ambulance shared some of the most ridiculous calls they’ve ever received, including one from a woman asking whether she could keep her eggs outside their box in the fridge overnight. Google it, duck.

BEESTON FOLK ARE DOING THE DUTTY

Back in 2015, Nottingham was brought under a black cloud of shame when it was announced that Beestonians just can’t keep themsens under control. According to the Official Infidelity Index, there were over 941 affairs tekking place in the town, bagging it the title of most adulterous place in the country. Two years on, it manage to drop down to ninth place in the list below Livingstone and High Wycombe. Nice one. But you're still a load of dutty boggers.

POSTMAN CHUCKS LETTERS AWAY COS BAG TOO HEAVY

We’ve all had days where we’ve spent an extra ten minutes in bed, conjuring up a believable excuse for not going to work. Piercing headache? Shits? Hand stuck on a cactus? Well, this postie was taken to court after it was discovered he’d chucked away over 200 letters and parcels cos his sack was too heavy to handle. His defence was that, having taken a break-up pretty hard, he’d lost three stone and been left too weak to lift his satchel. A lot of it was junk mail though, so he was probably doing us a favour. Cheers duck. Next time, sling our gas bill in there too wouldja?