Where's that Bastard Wally?

If ever there was a more intentionally sadistic attempt to cause stress to the more cerebrally challenged children of the UK, then it must have been even more insidious than the “Where’s Wally?” series of books. The concept of lulling society’s more seratonin-starved youth into believing that its easy to spot a conspicuously identifiable boy in a highly detailed picture containing several hundred other people is just plain fucking cruel. Because it’s not easy. It should be, but its not. And the realisation that such an easy task cannot be negotiated in the few seconds that you’d expect to spend trying, can cause frustration, stress, long-term feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem and psychological trauma; all of which manifest themselves into an inability to form stable relationships or assume the responsibility of parenthood, an unwillingness to undertake simple employment and a lasting suppressed rage which will occasional flare up and lead to criminal assault and probably incarceration.

Wally, you bastard, you have a lot to answer for.

So, which wanker came up with this idea? Whoever it was, the likelihood is that this person, as with most creators of children’s fiction, based Wally on his or her own son. You might lean towards being slightly sympathetic to any parents who found that every time they took their child out somewhere, the gormless little fucker would wander off and get himself lost. You’d even credit these unfortunate parents with some initiative for then dressing their child in a distinctive red and white top and matching woolly hat in order to be capable of finding them in a large crowd. And you would surely feel your heart go out to them when, after the 150th occasion of contacting the police to report their son missing, they had Social Services knocking on their door and the media turning them into the worst parenting pariahs since the McCann’s.

But then you’d think, why not just buy a high-viz jacket for the errant child? Buy some drugs that would induce agoraphobia. Stick a fucking lead on him like you do the dog. Whatever you do though, don’t turn your mishap into a series of iconic children’s books that could potentially cause society to collapse under its own frustrated sense of failure.

Perhaps I am over-reacting a little. The “Where’s Wally?” books should of course be lauded for their popularity, particularly as the spin off films and TV series have proved to be global successes. In case you’re not quite up to speed, I am referring to Harry Potter, Big Brother and Glee.

J K Rowling was commissioned to turn Wally into a literary and film icon by placing him in a situation where you’d never expect to find him: A boarding school for freaks, which was periodically attacked by some bastard with no nose and his right wing, gothic-looking cronies. If you didn’t know that Harry was an incarnation of Wally, then think about the usual reaction he gets when someone comes across him for the very first time. There’s always that look of awe and surprise as they slowly utter his name in prolonged syllables – “Har….ry….Pot…..ter!!!” Clearly, they’d spent ages trying to find him in a detailed drawing of a crowded fairground and now, here he was!

Adapting the concept of “Where’s Wally?” to television marked the start of the reality TV revolution. Hardening the humour somewhat, Channel 4 put a large crowd of people into a confined space and challenged us to play “Where’s the Arsehole?” With the same modus operandi as the original books, there were just too many to choose from and so, as with the books, it usually took about 3 months to single it down to one arsehole or wally. I am of course talking about Big Brother, “Where’s Wally?” for the small screen. And ironically, every housemate seemed to have suffered the same childhood affliction of struggling to find Wally on a page, because they each nursed the sort of fragile self-esteem that leads to over-compensating through self-promotion and affectation. In other words, they were a bunch of annoying c**ts. (And perhaps the worst was the one who looked the most like the original Wally - Sam Pepper.)

And so, “Where’s Wally?” evolved via Harry Potter into “Where’s the Arsehole?” aka “Big Brother” and then, like all good ideas, crossed the Atlantic where the Americans dumbed it down, glossed it over, sprinkled some sugar-coated moralising on top and made it a song-and-dance show that is now well-known to all of us as “Glee.”

“Glee” has a cast full of wallies or as our exiled cousins like to say, jerks. But in order not to tax their citizens of too much neuron activity, anyone you choose from the show can count as the jerk that you’re trying to find. Metaphorically, they all have red and white striped jumpers and hats. So, in case you can’t tell the difference, the programme makers have given each of them an obvious distinctive identify. Glee is a melting pot of stereotypes, but the message is clear. Celebrate diversity! You might be Christian or Jewish, disabled or able-bodied, Chinese or Hispanic, Black or White, Gay or Heterosexual, but you can still be a spoilt, self-centred, irritating show-off with the capacity to bastardise any popular song from the last four decades. You can’t however be any of that and be a Muslim. “Glee” shies away from having an obvious Muslim character, because that might just challenge a few innate prejudices too much. After all, between a red and white striped top and a red and a white striped hat is a white face and a red neck.

Finally, having started with Wally and ended with a totally unrelated diatribe against American redneck prejudices, I will return to base and reveal one more piece of useless fact. On page 11 of the 4th Wally book in the series, the prequel to the original, known as “The Phantom Wally,” it is actually impossible to find our chief protagonist, because in this beach scene he has been buried alive by violently neurotic bystanders who grew up reading the original books. Revenge is sweet.

How I became a Middle-Class Bastard

Actually, it’s more than that. I’m a Middle-AGED, Middle-class bastard now, which is twice as worse and means that I am poisonously laced with all the invidious attitudes that go with both stereotypes. For starters, I just used the word invidious. Only a paradigm of turpitude would employ such terminology. And I am that paradigm, which more or less means (before you feel the need to check the dictionary app on your phone like I just did) that I am a prime example of nasty self-righteous prejudice, housed in a liberal-socialist humanitarian-sequined overcoat of slightly narked politeness; or to be more precise - actually technically and basically my friends - a right bleeding middle-class bastard.

I wasn’t always this way.

I used to be young. And before that I used to be working class.

Before the amateur sociologists begin unpicking my blasé bandying about of class labels and accuse me of employing such unsuitably vague and over-generalised misnomers, let me just say one thing. I am deliberately stereotyping. Like pissing your pants in a supermarket queue, stereotyping is anti-social, offensive and just plain wrong, but from a non-protagonist’s viewpoint, it is highly amusing.

What turned me into this Middle-class bastard then? And what damage has it caused?

I believe that everything hinged on going to university, where I was rewarded for my half-efforts with a degree in Classical Studies. Here I surrounded myself with similar working-class people and poked fun at all the jumper-wearing, Sloane-accented veterans of multiple ski-holidays. But it was like walking into the sea and trying to shake yourself dry as you went along. I had begun to turn to the dark side and yet I would forever try to exert my working-class sensibilities by attacking those who were now my peers.

For example, the gentrification of football has meant that my £1000 a year season ticket provides me with a seat surrounded by some right middle-class tossers. In other words, they are more middle-class than I am and for that reason I despise them. I despise how they live down to their stereotypes, by pontificating in well-spoken accents about the game at loud volume, breaking off to discuss matters of economics, law and finance, being polite to each other and yet thoughtlessly ill mannered to everyone else around them. They all leave early and Stuart rings a taxi to take him home to Notting Hill, so that he doesn’t have to queue for the tube. Wanker.

Another example of raging against the middle-class machine from the inside was to do with that degree. I went on to do teacher training and there were 15 of us doing a PGCE in Classics. 13 had studied Ancient Greek or Latin at university and these “linguistic” Classicists were destined for jobs available only in the private sector or some grammar schools. 3 of us were non-linguistic Classicists, because we’d only taken one of those two ancient languages as a minor part of a degree that was more about the history and culture of Greece and Rome. It meant we could go on and teach History or English in state education and therefore we were able to revel in our non-elitism.

This didn’t help. I met my wife at university. She comes from Surrey and her family eat lots of vegetables. Not normal vegetables that you’d get from a tin, peas and carrots and the such like, but exotic vegetables like aubergines and courgettes and other stuff that looks like it comes out the ground rather than a shop. But now I eat all that shit and harbour a snobbish disregard for tinned veg, tinned fruit, microwave meals and wine costing less than £4. These are the measures of my middle-classness. Especially with regard to wine. I could have started this blog with a thesis about what exactly I mean by middle-class, but that would have been a middle-class thing to do; so to save trouble, let’s just assume that middle-class means that the ratio of wine to beer that you’d drink as a man is heavily weighted towards the former. I reckon I’m about 3:1, thus am I condemned.

So, what are the other factors in making me this way?

I live in St Albans. When I get into debt I remortgage, because my house is disgustingly overpriced on account of being near an excellent school to which I send my kids. It is of course a comprehensive school – I am against any other kind, in principle – but the intake of students is only comprehensive insofar as you have to be able to afford one of the semi-detached properties in the surrounding streets to be able to get in.

When it’s raining hard or excessively windy I worry about damage to the roof extension, rather than how shit it would be to have to get a bus to work.

When something goes wrong with my car, I stress about the cost and inconvenience of getting it fixed, because then we’d be down to just my wife’s car. Again, no bus worries.

Had I booked tickets for a holiday in Egypt this year, I’d have been cursing the locals for not being able to tolerate another year of tyrannical freedom-curbing government, because I might have lost my deposit to Thomson.

And I have just started playing squash. With a bloke called Tim.

That, my friends, is how I have turned to the Dark Side. I will leave you with one final example that best encapsulates the Russian Doll sense of being a middle-class bastard with a working-class one raging inside. My wife picked me up in her car from somewhere or other, because I had been drinking. Some dickhead driving behind us was too close, something I consider to be the height of macho intimidation and bad fucking manners. So, as we pulled away into another lane, he passed on our inside and I opened my window to spit a big grolly of phlegm at him. Sadly, it never have hit him in the face as his window was closed and he was going too fast, but if it had done then I am sure he would’ve noticed that my spit tasted of white wine. Probably Pinot Grigio and definitely from a £6 bottle.