The Barber of Seville’s Ballingry roots have been revealed after a Fife dad emerged as the unlikely star of a billboard advertising campaign across Spain and Portugal.
Brian Jobson, 49, who has been wielding the scissors at his Old Town Barber Club in Dunfermline for the last five years, learned he had become a poster boy for the industry when his daughter’s friend spotted his image on a wall during her first week as a student in Seville.
Brian’s image is being used to promote hairdressing as a possible career.
Languages student Lauryn Cassells, 20, was heading to a local station on her way to university at 6.30am when she noticed the familiar face from home on an advertising billboard.
She said: “As I was walking past with a friend, I said ‘that’s Millie’s dad, isn’t it?
“I looked at the poster a few times and I had to take a picture of it – it was a big billboard.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d done a double take.
“A few weeks ago I came to Seville with my dad to set up my flat and we drove past the billboard going to the airport and I said to my dad at the time ‘that looked really like Millie’s dad’,” she said.
“Because we were in a car, I didn’t get a chance to have a proper look at it, it just flashed by, so it’s quite weird that the flat is right next door to that billboard.”
The posters, which use a photo from Brian’s website as part of a recruitment campaign, have also been spotted in Lisbon, Porto and Faro.
Ballingry-raised Brian has told Lauryn his image might come in handy if she ever gets homesick, although he’s not sure he’s the right man to be attracting youngsters into the profession.
“There’s a very famous opera, the Barber of Seville, but that picture makes me look like the crabbit barber of Seville,” he said
The photo has been used by a Portuguese company, Do It Better, which runs training courses for a variety of occupations, including barbering.
The Lisbon-based company paid an agency to create the marketing campaign and has been featuring Brian for the last three years.
