The Framley Examiner

by Robin Halstead, Jason A. Hazeley, Alex Morris

When the outraged headline cries "Cycle Lane Not Even as Long as Small Cycle" you know something's not quite right. Welcome to Framley. Like a whimsical, silly step-child of the League of Gentlemen and TV Come Home this brilliant spoof of a local newspaper quickly became a favourite when it appeared online last year. The book of the website of the newspaper, this is set to be a classic.

Genres: Humor

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Rhoda Baxter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely bonkers and fun.
I like to dip into this book every so often when I need cheering up. I love the small ads pages. The ad for 'Can't you Breathe Little Bear' had me in stitches. I love the town names too, especially Effing Sodbury.
This is very British and very, very silly. Sometimes you need that.

[Lee Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've owned this book for ages, and have regularly dipped in and out of it, but only just got around to reading it from cover to cover. There's actually a huge amount of material in it, so it took a while to get through.

It's a fake local newspaper, mercilessly taking the piss in the most utterly bizarre and surreal way you've ever seen. Framley is easily the strangest town in the universe! Weird small ads. Very strange, violent and dangerous events. Oddly-named villages. Adverts for extraordinary products. It's all here!

The book is quite old now so bits of it are slightly dated, but that's not a major issue. If you like your humour very weird indeed, you'll love this.

[Simon Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a vague memory of 'The Framley Examiner' website being one of the greatest things on the internet back in the early days of the twenty-first century, and then I thought to myself, Well, why not confirm it or otherwise? So I bought a second-hand copy of the-book-of-the-website and - what do you know? - it's just as superb as I remembered.

For the uninitiated, 'The Framley Examiner' is a spoof local newspaper, with every single element of a dull provincial publication parodied, stretched and distorted to a ridiculous degree. It's a fantastically funny book and well worth tracking down.

[Nicholas Ball · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny fake news, but not like the Onion; this collection focuses on the phenomenon of the locally produced small town paper (complete with redundant sentences direly in need of an editor and occasional misspellings).

Some fantastic flights of fancy into the truly bizarre, plenty of fake ads and products on display as well, masterful stuff. Sections like the classifieds have been faithfully reproduced which means in a book of this size the type can get quite small! I found a magnifying glass occasionally helpful.

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

'The tiny articles printed tinyly are so much fun to squint and almost laugh', said Doris Chumley, 'yesterday I went to show Chester one particularly funny bit, but it turned out it was crumpet crumbs not print, and he read something quite different when I took it to him', she giggled. 'And it's more like that every time I read it!' Chester concurred, noting that the crumpet was actually more of a scone, with the cheese and all.