Small Boy completed his D*vid Walli*ms book collection today, so I finally decided to take a read of the latest. (It's important to note here I've not bought a single one.)

It's like Little Britain for kids. 37m copies sold? Of this sneering classist fatshaming grim nonsense?

A Thread Will Now Follow, And People Will Possibly Get Mad At Me.

Supermum, in The World's Worst Parents, is BORING because she lives in a TOWER BLOCK and she CLEANS TOILETS. Single mum of two, Spike and Punk. I'm not sure what qualifies her as being one of the World's Worst Parents when all she does is love her kids and make them laugh?

Lord Grandiose, TWWP. "Granville didn't laugh exactly. If he found something funny, like the misfortune of poor people..."

You what mate? Had to close the book at this point and have a small chat with my Small Boy about how 'misfortune' and 'poverty' aren't punchlines for jokes.

It's a recurring theme. And I know I'm sensitive, because me and my Small Boy LIVED in poverty, and Williams-Who-Calls-Himself-Walliams-For-Lolz probably didn't. Probably doesn't know anyone who did, which is why working class people are all bland stereotypes in his lazy books.

There's a kid in this book called Ping Pong, and I'd find it difficult to believe that's not a throwback to (the now derided racist trope) Ting Tong from LB. But there are more than enough examples to be getting on with without gymnastics back through the ages, so I'll continue.

And don't get me started on this. How the fuck is this nonsense published?

Back to Little Britain, we have the Classic Projectile Vomiting Joke.

Four whole pages of it. Does he not have any new material?

There's the black female teacher, Miss Tutelage, whose 'big frizzy hair' is a punchline. As is the school bully calling her 'Archbishop Desmond Tutu'.

Which seems verbose for a character who was just saying 'WOT?' and being kept back many school years for being 'thick'.

I'm actually reading them one by one now so this thread could take a while. And I'm aware I probably come across as a joyless harpy, but a white wealthy man using working class and black women as punchlines for his tired old jokes and then spoon-feeding them to children is grim.

Back to the black woman, and Walliams is making a joke about her having an unpronounceable name. Ha. Ha. Fuck off.

(I don't hate anyone as a rule, but that rule is being sorely tested by this viscerally unfunny and actually harmful bullshit masquerading as children's literature)

'Four eyes' being used about a character with glasses.

'Fat' as a derogatory description, pretty much throughout.

Another projectile vomit joke.

"Frizzball" as a nickname for the teacher with the big hair and unpronounceable name...

I'm still going.

Into the World's Worst Teachers, and we have a pair of twins. Aww, child geniuses. Wait, their eyes aren't illustrated in the same way as other children's eyes in this book. They're....horizontal slits. The kids, the child genius kids with slits-as-eyes are called the Tang twins.

I think that's enough for one evening. I'll pick up on this again tomorrow because I need to go rinse my brain out and read something that isn't this horrific racism and classism and bodyshaming in a veneer of privileged deniability.

I always knew I didn't like him, but wow.

How quickly Publishing Twitter have leapt to this, seeing I didn't tag him, asterisked his name so it wouldn't search, and people tweeting/DMing me in defence don't follow me. I'm not intimidated. I will call out injustice wherever I see it,& his continual punching down is unjust

Not to mention the absolute arrogance of thinking you can publish shit like this - and I include every single pair of eyes that signed these books off in that - and nobody will ever hold you to account.

I *am also* an author, who has had chunks of my text pulled for being 'too seductive' (description of garlic in carbonara, book 2), 'too gritty' (the realities of poverty, book 1), and many rewrites through editors, subs, copy eds, etc. So it's not just DW who is accountable here

And yes, it is important that books are published that we don't always agree with and that don't correspond to our worldview. I own many of those, you possibly wouldn't guess my politics from a snapshot of my bookshelves, and I read almost all newspapers. That's not what this is.

But that's not what children's books are for. Being granted unfettered access to shaping young and impressionable minds is a privilege that should be taken incredibly seriously. Not used as a tool to embed lazy racist tropes and classist stereotypes, and encourage bullying.

Anyway, off for a bath. Please leave your recommendations for morally sound, well written, funny children's books below. Let's promote people who deserve it. X

So, Billionaire Boy. I got to this quite late last night because my older cat had diarrhoea and shat all over my fave bathroom mat, up the shower cubicle, and across the radiator. So it’s fair to say my evening did not go as planned.

Our protagonist is called Joe Spud. The opening illustration shows him as being a lad who is rather rotund. Joe is 12 years old, and ‘ridiculously, preposterously rich’. He has everything he could ever want, including a 24 hour personal masseuse. Female. For a 12 year old.

Having a woman on tap to service this twelve year old boy is put in the same category of desirability as having trainers, a television, and popcorn. Inaniminate. Disposable. An object. A plaything.

There is much made of Joes size as a scene setter. He needs his F1 car made a bit BIGGER. because
he was FAT, you see. And this FAT KID didn’t have any friends.

Fat Joe crashed his fancy car because he hadn’t eaten for a few moments, and unwrapped a KING SIZE mars bar at the wheel of it. He told his Dad, who was also short and fat, like his short and fat son. (Apart from anything else, this is a tiresomely repetitive read.)

Joes Dad is reading The Sun. (Not sure why a newspaper devoted to division, xenophobia, and tits needs a name check in a children’s book but I suppose it makes sense to keep the top selling newspaper* on side for publicity reasons, a shrewd PR move)

*at the time of publication, it’s now #2, it’s sales figures having declined more rapidly than the Mails did, doinking it down to second place in the league table of shitey reads.

Ah! The Sun is a plot device! Because it gives our beloved author an opportunity to mention, in this book aimed at CHILDREN AGED SEVEN AND UP, that Mr Spud ‘handed an envelope to his son, without taking his eyes off the girl on Page 3’

I find this incredibly odd, as DW has famously dated P3 girls, so using them as a punchline here, in a children’s book, feels rather grim.

A page so later, and we have Mr Spuds origin story. He wasn’t always rich, now he is, and now he’s rich he ‘began going on dates with an endless parade of Page 3 girls’.

What the fuck is this doing....in a CHILDRENS BOOK?

Chapter Two. Opens with six words, four of which are ‘Bum boy.’ ‘Bum boy?’ So edgy Walliams had to repeat it. For the uninitiated, Bum Boy is a vile homophobic slur that was popular in school playgrounds in the 1990s, where most of Walliams ‘humour’ seems to derive from.

(The issue here is that those of us who were children in those playgrounds in the 1990s grew up and left these ignorant phrases behind us, and didn’t expect to be confronted with them 20 years later in books targeted at our own children.)

‘Bullying was something that happened to poor people’.

Possibly the most selfaware thing DW has written in his entire life, and could only be improved upon if he added ‘usually by wealthy white men who use their vast platforms to bully those they consider beneath them, like me!’

On the class timetable, ‘Learning To Step Over The Homeless Person As You Leave The Opera’ is listed as a lesson on Tuesdays, alongside Greek and Croquet.

On Fridays, they discuss How The Working Classes Smell.

Back in the very large house for the very large Joe and his very large Dad, Joe is ‘bum jumping along the sofa’. Bum jumping is ‘much favoured by the overweight’. Christ David, you rail-thin effete-for-effect mangled twiglet, we GET THE PICTURE.

Oh JESUS ANOTHER PAGE THREE GIRL REFERENCE. Did one hurt you, David?!! Try telling your therapist, not the bloody CHILDREN about it.

‘Joe looked at the page. There was a photograph of a woman whose clothes seemed to have fallen off. Her hair was dyed white blonde and she had so much makeup on it was difficult to tell if she was pretty or not’

I will take no, NO lectures on makeup from this man.

‘Underneath the image it read, Sapphire, 19...hates thinking.’

This is being painted as aspirational for impressionable children, to be a man in his mid forties dating teenagers.

I cannot fathom where he gets his inspiration from.

Chapter 3: Who’s The Fattiest?

For crying out loud. Fat. Isn’t. A. Punchline.

Not once, not dozens of times in a couple of chapters. This messaging is genuinely harmful to children. There’s a lot of info out there if you care to read it, and as a children’s author, you should.

Joe is moving to the local comp. he cannot get the bus with his £50 note, so he walks, ‘his flabby thighs rubbing together as he took each step’.

I might go back and count the fat references because I’m starting to suspect DW might have some kind of real problem.

At registration, there was only one other friendless kid alone. He was fat, just like Joe. (!!)
‘I’m Bob, said the fat boy’ (!!)
They waddled (!!!) along the corridor

David, speaking as a person who had an eating disorder for a decade, I don’t like you but I think you need help.

Oop, the Bum Boy slur is back. Makes a change from variations on fat. Oh no wait there are no variations, although the thesaurus proffers dozens of alternatives (if you insist on being a bully you could try to be an imaginative one?) it’s just fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat here

Okay I’m reading this on my other phone and I’m just going to snap this section because I can’t even type it out I’m too mad -

also I seem to have found the max number of tweets in a draft thread, so I’ll be back shortly. With an excoriating skewer of why NAMING SPECIFIC WEIGHTS AND LABELLING THEM AS FAT IS FUCKING PROBLEMATIC. But doing it in a children’s book is absolutely beyond the pale.

I was six years old when the song *st *lbs was released by the Manic Street Preachers. I heard it on the radio and didn’t think much of it, but I have a weird memory for songs and can recall them almost perfectly.

I refuse to put the numbers in there, because Responsibility.

I was around ten years old when I stopped eating. Hiding my lunches. Shoving all my dinner to one side of my plate, pretending I was sick. I sang that song on a loop in my head for ten years because to me, it was the Ideal Weight. Because the Manics said so.

But in their defence, the Manics weren’t a children’s band. They weren’t making material specifically targeted at impressionable young minds. But Walliams is. And there will be children, now, who will read his SEVEN STONE IS THE FATTEST OF THE FAT and they will carry that forever

I know, because I was one of those children who was ambushed at a young age with an explicit media representation of what is an ideal weight, and I won’t be the only one. I have to stop reading now, but I’ll be back in the morning. I need kitten cuddles and self care. Goodnight.

Before I go, a couple of weeks ago, because of a mild relapse and a change in medication and a severe mouth sore, I was severely and clinically underweight. I was fainting, lethargic, hollow.

In Walliams world, I was still THE FATTEST KID IN THE SCHOOL.

Fuck you.

Goodnight.

(I’m recovering now, thankyou. Off to stroke the kitten. Bear in mind I’m only partway through chapter three of the second of his books I’ve read. I’m in this for the long haul until the lawyers come for me. It’s not personal, it’s responsible. I’m a parent. And I had no idea.)

I finished Billionaire Boy last night. I started folding down pages of bits to come back and talk about but stopped when almost all of the pages were being folded. The line by line takedown is possibly more work than writing the thing in the first place.

So I'll finish my summary by saying that CALLING A PRE-TEEN GIRL A SLAG IN A BOOK AIMED AT 7 YEAR OLDS IS UNACCEPTABLE. How, @HarperCollinsCh @HarperCollins @HarperCollinsUK, did this get through all the eyes in the editing process to be deemed suitable for publication?

Calling anyone a slag, ever, is crappy, but teaching that word to very young children in material designed for and aggressively marketed to them is unkind, misogynistic, revolting and irresponsible. (A reminder that this is not a personal crusade against DW, it's a book review.)

These books are the bestselling books for children and they are backed by the heft of an enormous publishing machine and judging by the response to my thread and the fact it was trending y'day, it would seem most parents, like me, were unaware of the nature of the content.

Now I have work to be getting on with, recipes to edit and books to mail out, so I'll be back later on. I am incredulous that the publishers have decided to hold the line on this and seemingly hope I go away(?) so I'm not going anywhere.

HarperCollins have replied to one of the several examples, not to me, but via the Daily Mail, to say that one of the characters I said was black wasn’t black, she was white, ergo, mocking her big frizzy hair, unpronounceable name and calling her ‘Desmond Tutu’ can’t be racist.

It appears nobody briefed the illustrator.

Of course there’s always the possibility that I’ve got this particular example wrong, so I’ll leave these here and you can decide for yourself.

I await their individual Daily Mail articles for each of my points, seems quite a laborious way of doing things, but if I may, can I request a thorough gaslighting of the Tang Twins and Raj to be bumped to the head of the queue? Because I’d love to hear how they’re not racist.

I’m not doing a DW book tonight because frankly I need a break from being furious. I’m not going away, though, I’m spending time with my kid, the kitten, big sulky older cat, cake, my AA sponsor, and good positive books instead. Excoriating children’s literature can wait a day.x

I’m actually really sad that HarperCollins haven’t used this as an opportunity for growth. I’ve been contacted by over a hundred schools, librarians, Indy bookshops etc who have removed his literature for review, so they should be taking this content seriously.

What I imagine will happen is they will hold the line, wait for me to either run out of steam or carry on to the point I look mad (I am unashamedly mad, but also ADHD/autistic so can get fixated and have a strong sense of injustice)...

...and then they’ll get sensitivity readers in for his next book to make sure none of this crap is in it. And if that happens, that’s better than nothing I guess. But for now, I’m outta here for the night. Have fun, take care, stay safe, wash your hands, don’t be mean. X