Describing Walliams' character assassinations as cruel, borderline racist, wholly politically incorrect and unsuitable for kids, it's weird that it's actually taken this long for someone to notice that Walliams' trademark comedic writing style is hugely based around this type of stuff.
We waded into the Twitter-scrap with a couple of points made about the reasons that Walliams' depictions of working-class 'heroes' are so skewed, and there's no other place to lay the blame than at the children's publishing industry - that would happily trade a few rather unsavoury views from a million-selling author for the inevitable colossal revenues that author makes. Children's publishing isn't here to steer your kids through the moral maze of early life, it's here to make a shitload of cash - often off a few authors whose books are guaranteed to sell.
One or two authors waded into the fray bravely (as they always do whenever Mr Walliams work crops up on Twitter, though obviously not through any professional envy of his sales, or jealousy of the amount of promotion his books get - whether they need it or not - oh no!). I was quite intrigued by one person's theory that the rise and rise of just a few select authors is entirely down to the (quite frankly) pathetic amount of coverage children's books get in the mainstream media. "No one's reviewing books!" was the claim. Bit of a slap in the face when you've been reviewing them for ten years, have garnered a metric ton of regular readers and followers, but obviously don't work for a major trash rag (or newspaper as some people call them), or aren't 'celebrity' enough to talk about books to your zillion and one Instagram followers.
Publishing is so achingly middle class that it's actually almost turning into a parody. We wrote about this two years ago in another ReadItTorial - Are children's books becoming more 'elitist / classist' as publishing becomes increasingly dominated by the "Middle Class"? - A ReadItTorial - and re-reading this the points still stand. I think back then I rather over-optimistically thought that things might change for the better, and soon - but it definitely has not been the case.
Once the focus on Walliams had died down a bit, authors and book folk began to bare their teeth at others. Enid Blyton is currently being held up as 'the person who kicked off the whole problem' of market saturation by a single author. Her bigoted and quite often openly racist texts have already been subject to some rather creative editing for newer published versions of her stories, but the class thing has wholly been ignored. Blyton's working class folk are depicted as thick, lazy, often criminal in intent, and quite often the villains of her stories - so yeah, that whole class bias thing isn't exactly new in children's publishing.
Then Roald Dahl came under fire. He's already been given a thorough verbal kicking on Twitter for his anti-semitic views, but others picked out parts of his stories where racist stereotypes crept into otherwise excellent stories.
As I tweeted, I still think that a huge lack of representation for working class authors in the industry is not helping things at all. There are a few authors who've somehow managed to infiltrate middle-class-dominated kidlit, but they often struggle to stay put, often find that their core subject matter isn't what agents or publishers or commissioning editors are looking for. I remember the market being quite different when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, and it felt like there were so many more books around that featured kids like me who had a fairly poor upbringing, but could wholly identify with a central character in a book who wore torn hand me down clothes, a bit of a latchkey kid whose parents were absent not because they were gadding off on a round-the-world cruise or were wrapped up in their jobs as highly successful fashion designers / international spies / TV personalities, but because they were working every frigging hour just to put food on the table.
The entire children's publishing industry is due a reboot. Not just because children's books are suffering from the hard applied rules that new authors face, like an insurmountable brick wall, but because there really is no way for a normal everyday person to eke a living out of writing (certainly not for many, many years) - so retention of talent other than those best-selling authors just doesn't happen. The whole model is either fragile or irreparably broken from one end to the other, and I sincerely doubt that, despite the clamouring on Twitter and the insistence that the publishing industry just got a rocket up its arse, things really won't ever change and let's face it, we live in a country where the creative arts are treated like mere folly anyway, so there's that mountain to climb too.