Image details: Bognor Birdman served by picapp.com
Oh no, we’ve only gone and done it! In a moment of sheer madness (fuelled by Pier pressure) we have decided to enter this year’s Birdman competition, which will be gracing Worthing Pier in all its colourful glory for the first time this year. Never mind that it involves ‘flying’ off a pier into a sub-zero temperature sea – any excuse to dress up in a ridiculous costume and do something silly! Let’s face it, when such a prestigious event comes to your town, you can’t just ignore it. Well, and it’s a brilliant PR stunt which us Brand Doctors are rather good at …
The first Birdman competition was held in 1971 in Selsey as a flight competition for human-powered flying machines. It moved to Bognor in 1978 where the event really ‘took off’ and has continued to grow and grow. The aim is to ‘fly’ as far away as possible from the pier for a top cash prize of £30 000. The actual result is a hilarious display of nutters in silly costumes jumping off the pier, mostly raising money for charity. When a 60ft section of the Bognor Pier was demolished last March the organizers deemed the event too risky, as the water at the new end of the pier was now too shallow to safely ‘plop’ into. Worthing won it from Brighton in a bid to host the event this year, not a bad result!
Wacky nutters in fancy dress attract big crowds! In the past few years an average of 30 000 spectators have been flocking to the Birdman competitions and with media coverage from the BBC and international TV crews, this event will certainly help to put our little town of Worthing on the map. Bognor is now more famous for the Birdman competition than the local Butlins …
So here we are in the safe comfort of the Brand Surgery office, where in between all the wonderful graphic design and website design and development, all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas are bouncing around to hopefully create the Theme of all Themes and costumes to boot. And let me tell you, whilst our brains are a bakin’, our knees are a shakin’ along!
Yes, just thinking about it already makes us want to jump for joy …
Click here for some highly entertaining footage and to see what we are getting ourselves into.
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