

Fact from fiction ... was Tom Cruise at the World's Biggest Liar competition, or wasn't he? Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP



With Tom Cruise at one end of the bar and Tony and Cherie Blair at the other, the Bridge Inn in the heart of the Lake District was packed last week for the annual World's Biggest Liar competition.

Fired by the first prize of dinner with Sienna Miller on the Eurostar from St Pancras, more than 20 contestants tried to deceive lying experts from as far away as South Africa with ingenious mixtures of complete invention and a dash of truth.

Thanks to a sprinkling of the sort of people who believed that the Cruises and Blairs were indeed in the Bridge Inn, disbelief seemed to be suspended at the event more often than anyone might expect in a competition openly flagging up fibs.

"You've got to try for the right mixture of a tall story and episodes which might be true, or even actually were," said

John Graham, a Cumbrian farmer who seized the champion's title back after six years of narrow defeats.

He fought off an expected challenge from comedian Sue Perkins who took the title last year with a semi-truth-based story about the threat to the ozone layer from flatulent Lake District sheep.

The competition at the Bridge Inn in Wasdale dates back to a 19th-century landlord Will Ritson, who supplemented the dale's deepest lake, highest mountain and smallest church in England with a reputation for telling the country's tallest stories.

Anyone can enter except lawyers and politicians, who are barred as likely to be "professionals", and a Church of England bishop once won with the shortest-ever speech: "I have never told a lie in my life."

Mr Graham, who is 69 and farms at Silloth, has won the championship five times before, usually with homely tales about his cat, his wife's pet turkey and unusual events in their garden. This year he turned to fishing and developed an initially truthful yarn into a shaggy dog story involving a German submarine and much else, which won largely because of its ingenuity.

"They should really call it the World's Tallest Story competition," he said after claiming his prize, a silver trophy from the Cockermouth brewers, Jennings, who brewed a special Liar's Beer for the evening. The event took second billing on the BBC's Cumbria website; top of the site was the discovery of a red squirrel found "swimming strongly in the middle of Ullswater". Which was true.

· If you fancy attending next November's competition, rooms are available in the Bridge Inn in Santon. There is more information on the western Lake District website.