The famous Alton Towers resort is to close its famous World of David Walliams attraction. By the turn of the decade, Walliams’s famous books had established themselves as a dependable literary brand in the lucrative children’s fiction market, and Joanna Lumley, Robbie Williams and Andi Peters were among the famous personalities who famously appeared in TV adaptations of the stories, though the campaigner Jack Monroe had described them as “horrific racism and classism and bodyshaming in a veneer of privileged deniability”. Spoilsport!
The famous Alton Towers resort is a funfair co-owned by the famous consortium Motion JVCO Ltd, which includes Kirkbi, who control the famous Lego brand of children’s activity toys, Blackstone Inc, and CPP Investments. Blackstone was famously fined $1.5m for breaching child labour laws in slaughterhouses, and has famously been accused of investing in companies causing Amazon deforestation. CPP Investments manages Canadian pension plans for elderly Canadians. Its clients are Canadian, and they are old. CPP Investments is arguably the most harmless investment company it is possible to imagine. Together the three commercial entities facilitate family fun at the Alton Towers resort, where forced child labour and mass deforestation are both rarities.
Motion JVCO Ltd realised a David Walliams-themed sub-zone within the wider fun-region would likely increase footfall and revenue. And so, from 2021, visitors to the World of David Walliams could enter the famous area, formerly Cloud Cuckoo Land, through an arch made of false books, and walk past the Royal Carousel into a wonderland of mock Tudor houses and solidly normal midcentury homes, all decorated in inviting primary colours, many containing rides themed on famous characters and concepts from Walliams’s famous books: Gangsta Granny – The Ride; Raj’s shop – The Shop; Mr Poo – The Log Flume; Stinky Albert – The Back Alley Rollercoaster; Fartland – The Chamber of Smells; and Wicked Winky’s Wee Wee Waterfall. It is important that children read. At any cost.
The Jimmy Savile Ghost Train ride that we all so innocently enjoyed at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the 80s now belongs to a different and less cynical time
The sudden closure of the World of David Walliams reflects nothing more than the volatile nature of the themed fun-zone marketplace. Entertainment brands rise and fall. I remember visiting a Wombles World at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Birmingham’s Bingley Hall in 1974, but a Wombles World would draw few fans today, and the tragic death this week of the Wombles’ band’s drummer, Stoke Newington’s Clem Cattini, is unlikely to do anything to reinflate the Womble market; the Jimmy Savile Ghost Train ride that we all so innocently enjoyed at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the 80s now belongs to a different and less cynical time; and it is impossible to believe that Drayton Manor resort once hosted an “adult” haunted house based on Powick Hospital, the Worcester County “Pauper and Lunatic Asylum” finally closed after decades of cruelty allegations in 1989.
The question now is, until the Alton Towers resort swings back into action in the spring, what use can be made of the buildings and structures in the now empty World of David Walliams? The answer is staring us in the face. When asylum seekers were to be processed in a nearby disused RAF base, the Le Creuset-pitchfork-wielding villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire were so worried about the safety of their women and girls they asked to be incorporated as the 51st state of America by Donald Trump, an adjudicated sexual abuser who was friends with the dead paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, and has boasted of grabbing women by the pussy. The fact that they were able to overlook these faults of their proposed sex-attack saviour shows just how unwelcome asylum seekers are in rural communities.
But would it then make more sense, at least temporarily over the winter, to house the asylum seekers in the now dormant buildings of Alton Towers’ World of David Walliams, far away from the fearful folk of Piddington or the Facebook-fuelled fury of the RNLI-hating mobs intermittently assembled on England’s south coast? Shell-shocked survivors of foreign wars could cheer themselves up with repeated rides on Mr Poo’s log flume; traumatised youths could sleep soundly at night in Walliams’s cosy Chamber of Smells; and undocumented migrants could spend the £500 a week they are given by Andy Burnham’s Labour government on David Walliams books and merchandise in Raj’s Shop, the corner store from Walliams’s bestseller Gangsta Granny.
Perhaps when the park opens again fully in the spring, instead of putting a whole new attraction into Walliams’s world, the migrants could be invited to remain there, as a tourist attraction in their own right, to assuage the morbid and fearful fascination of the racist British public, who could view them through a secure mesh. It seems impossible to imagine now, especially as I made up stuff about a tasteless Jimmy Savile ghost train and a Haunted House Powick Hospital earlier, but in the 1920s visitors to the Blackpool Tower could genuinely take a tour of Midget Town, where they could observe the daily lives of 40 people of restricted height, several ponies and an elephant. Could Alton Towers’ Migrant World work in a similar way, with or without the ponies and the elephant?
If there is a problem with the plan of housing migrants in the former World of David Walliams, it is simply that the environment might seem too welcoming. When he was the immigration minister, the miserly Reform MP Robert Jenrick ordered that cheery murals of Disney characters, in a Dover reception centre for unaccompanied minor migrants, were painted over. The colourful figures that populate the World of David Walliams have historically delighted children all over the world. If we are to house migrants in the World of David Walliams, as has been suggested, then their images must either be removed, or some way must be found of robbing them for ever of any positive connotations.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
And he is supporting the singer-songwriter John Smith, performing Pea Green Boat with him, at St Pancras Old Church, London, on 25 and 26 November