Sir Norman Wrassle
Tripe Marketing Board chairman Sir Norman Wrassle has declared the dawn of a new period of openness for the TMB, saying the time had come to level with the tripe-buying public.
Speaking from an unnamed location, Sir Norman denied reports that he was under some form of house arrest. “It’s ridiculous to suggest that, just because I haven’t been seen in public for a week or so, that I’m somehow not free to come and go as I please,” he said. Sir Norman was speaking to a reporter from the Wigan Daily Mail, which had carried a series of recent articles critical of the TMB’s traditional policy of ‘flying beneath the radar’ – in other words, of keeping a deliberately low profile.
“It’s a policy that has served us well throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s,” he said, “but the time has surely come to revisit it.” Sir Norman pointed to advances in modern radar technology that made it impossible for any competent marketing organisation to evade detection. “Thankfully, we’re not a particularly competent marketing body – if we were, sales of tripe would, by now, surely have taken off. While we have had some modest successes, it’s true to say that we’ve not yet succeeded in campaigns to persuade more people to give tripe a try,” he said.
The beneath the radar strategy meant that the TMB had managed to prevent itself from being abolished, unlike a host of other marketing bodies, and was first advocated by Flt Lt ‘Binky’ Harrison, chairman of one the TMB’s predecessor organisations, the British Tripe Council.
“I’ve just been the figurehead for the TMB,” Sir Norman said, adding “It’s time the world got to see the backroom boys and girls who really make it tick” as he promised a ‘warts and all’ book telling the true history of the TMB would be published in 2023.
In the meantime, Sir Norman confirmed that the board had authorised £2 from the sale of every copy of Forgotten Yorkshire be gifted to food banks in Yorkshire, in perpetuity, or for so long as food banks continued to exist.