A traditional British Christmas is not complete until we have all enjoyed the seasonal cancellation of a celebrity, under the mistletoe. Excitement mounts during Advent as to who the luckless sap might be this year and then, on cue, the little cardboard door is at last opened and we all gather around the tree for a joyous hatefest.
I was fairly happy with this year’s choice, the comedian and children’s author David Walliams, as there is something about his manner and that weird shiny moonface which has always slightly irritated me. He has been dropped by his publisher, HarperCollins, and the BBC has announced it has no plans to work with him in the future as a consequence of it being reported that he had harassed women at the publishing firm (Walliams denies the claims) and had previously made lewd comments about women on the set of Britain’s Got Talent, the awful TV show upon which he was, for a while, a judge.
I must have read several thousand words regarding Mr Walliams’s alleged behaviour and I still do not have the remotest clue as to what it is he has done. There were even first-person testimonies from women he had grievously transgressed and no detail there, either, about what had actually transpired. The most I could glean was that he had been ‘rude’ to women, or perhaps ‘inappropriate’, although quite in what way was never even remotely explained. However one woman befriended by Walliams when she was 17 let slip that he had been in the habit of inviting contestants into his Britain’s Got Talent dressing room for cupcakes – and that was good enough for me. Hang the bastard. Cake-munching scum.
Our glee at the defenestration of Walliams will have been tempered by the fact that he has not been completely financially ruined as a consequence of his downfall. It’s not really a proper cancellation unless the sleb is rendered penniless, like Huw Edwards was. Sadly, that will not happen with Walliams because he is an extraordinarily successful children’s author, having sold 50 million books worldwide, at least one of which has been televised. So he’s got some dosh stashed away, then. Surely there must be a way we can get at it? As you might expect, alongside the articles not detailing what Walliams hadn’t done with women were sidebar pieces explaining why it was only to be expected from a bloke who wrote books like that. One woman, writing in the Telegraph, castigated Walliams’s publications – such as The Boy in a Dress – for making fun of fat or smelly people and also depicting female characters who were not always strong, independent, bi-curious women. Sheesh, wait until she hears about Roald Dahl. Her head will explode. Or, for that matter, Enid Blyton. Or Hans Christian Andersen. Or indeed any writer for kids whom the kids actually want to read, rather than bloodless PC dross by culturally approved authors currently being rammed into their heads.
Something about his manner and that weird shiny moonface has always slightly irritated me
I have never read any of Walliams’s books – I have an aversion to literary success based upon celebritydom, and having watched a dramatisation of one of Richard Osman’s detective books I am convinced this aversion is of great benefit to myself. I have only once watched Britain’s Got Talent, too – so I don’t have much skin in the game when it comes to the question of how much I should hate Walliams for his alleged bakery-centred harassment of women.
Except for one thing – Little Britain. Or at least not the show itself, which was sporadically very funny, but for the craven, gutless, hypocritical apology for parts of it issued by the show’s two creators, Walliams and Matt Lucas, at the height of woke in 2020. For that, they should both be pilloried and beaten on the soles of their feet.
Little Britain, which ran between 2003 and 2006, was often coarse and crass and had none of the genius which dignified the greatest of comedies of that time – principally The Office, but also The Mrs Merton Show, The Royle Family and Father Ted. It too often relied upon catchphrases to be truly great comedy. But it succeeded because it identified characters we all knew existed but whom hitherto it had been taboo to joke about. The moronic chav Vicky Pollard – a sister perhaps of Catherine Tate’s Lauren Cooper and maybe the offspring of Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke’s Wayne and Waynetta Slob. The non-disabled disabled man Andy Pipkin, and the ‘neurologically diverse’ Anne, patronised by the authorities and entrusted with tasks quite beyond her capabilities.
And of course Emily and Florence, the two wholly unconvincing transgender women – hell, if ever a sketch theme was prescient, this was it. These two, one of them sporting a moustache (I forget which one), were perpetually outraged at being misgendered, despite the fact that everyone who saw them knew that without question they were men. So this is history occurring first as farce and only later developing into tragedy, when our entire establishment and corporations and politicians swallowed whole the delusional idiocies from the trans lobby.
Then there was the middle-aged, well-to-do woman who vomited if she ate food made by homosexuals, lesbians or foreigners – a character with whom I felt a certain casual affinity. These were funny skits because, as I say, we recognised a certain preposterous truth about them. All of that was to be swept away in the next two decades, which is why comedy has become so utterly dismal. Truth banished, spite banished – everything had to conform to the new agenda.
But comedy works because it refuses to conform to any agenda. Walliams and Lucas said of their show: ‘Once again we want to make it clear that it was wrong and we are very sorry.’ What extraordinary hypocrisy about a show which made them household names. For this reason I was happy to join in with this year’s hatefest – and next year, then, let’s sort out Lucas.
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