How Glenn Wool's dad ended up in a Jeffrey Archer novel |

How Glenn Wool's dad ended up in a Jeffrey Archer novel

comedyNow a plot twist so outlandish that you'd imagine even Jeffrey Archer wouldn't entertain it.

But it transpires that vagabond, journeyman stand-up Glenn Wool's father was a top cop in Toronto. And what's more, he so impressed Archer that he based a police officer upon him in his first novel, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less.

Two years previously in 1974, Wool Sr had investigated Aquablast, a fraudulent Canadian cleaning firm into which Archer had invested his life savings, prompting his resignation as an MP after he declared bankruptcy.

Wool wasn't aware of the Archer connection until he moved to England. Nor did he fully appreciate the peril that his father's work had placed him in at the time.

'It was a very difficult time for our family' he remarked of his early childhood to the Amsterdam Comedy Podcast.

In the interview, recorded two years ago, but only just released, he alludes to vague malevolent forces who would 'do things to try and break you apart…

'There were a few times that my dad got a call like, “Oh, it's an old friend of yours from high school, she wants you to come down to this hotel and meet her”.'

But his father smelt a honeytrap. 'They're trying to get me, they're going to take photos' Wool recalled his father saying.

Some years later, his mother had grown exasperated at the inability of successive firms to fit their home with the internet. 'Oh yeah' replied his father matter-of-factly about the phone lines, 'they're bugged. I forgot to tell you about that.'

'So I was eating dinner, I was a teenager at the time, and I was like “what?!”' said Wool. 'Because I had been using those phone lines for possibly arranging some deals that I may have been making.

'I wasn't a deal-er, so to speak. But I had definitely been talking to a few over those phonelines...'

Published: 2 May 2017

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