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Gavin Haynes Sleepless Nights

Mourning the Death of the British Prankster

At some point, we stopped laughing at low-level socially acceptable bullying.

Once, Britain was the kind of country where you could turn up on a stag weekend with nothing more than a can of shaving foam, a razor, a skimpy black dress, a pink wig, some false breasts, three Rohypnol, wrist-ties and a sign saying: “Transexual prostitute for hire. If asleep, please simply leave payment in jar,” and go about your business of pranking unmolested. This is less and less the case. We’re a country increasingly ill at ease with our past as a proud pranking nation. The merry prankster of merrie olde Englande, once as recognisable an archetype in village life as the kinky vicar, the whistling milkman or the local policeman, is dying out. This was always essentially a suburban figure. He’d be alright to lurch out of St Albans rugby club at 2AM and strap you to a pig while pushing a dildo up your or the pig’s arse, according to his taste/religion. Those tactics weren’t always going to work so cleanly in Salford. Places like that, people always tended to like their male social pecking-order rituals less ornate, more stabby. Every town probably had an invisible prankster periphery – where the laddish manhandling force of the prankster was outweighed by the greater threat of blokes who were serious about their violence. Yet the prankster now finds himself drowning beneath an avalanche of red tape and changing attitudes, open to lawsuits and often scorned just for being who he is. Just as the liberal wets have outlawed birching and fagging, so too we’ve seemingly lost our stomach for low-grade socially-acceptable bullying by our friends or minor celebrities. For a generation who grew up knowing that they should always be alert as to whether the person on the other end of the phone was actually Mr T, or merely bollock faced impressionist dickhead Jon Culshaw, this has been particularly hard to accept. In the 70s, if you gave a local prankster 20 kilos of cement, 200 condoms and a cubic metre of gelatine powder, you could practically hear the hamster wheel in his head revolving if you stood close enough. In the 80s, if you wanted to be on radio but couldn’t impersonate a nurse wanting to know if someone’s boyfriend was in so that they could give him his embarrassing STD test results, your career was self-evidently going nowhere. The golden era of Hairy Cornflake, Noel Edmonds, et al, only slightly sullied by their contemporaries' recent tendency to turn up in court on child sex charges, turned the phone prank into the chief reason for commercial radio to exist at all. Even Paxman probably had to spend some time paying his dues by claiming to be a mechanic who had accidentally driven your car into a swimming pool. Yet more and more, we’re programmed to resist being pranked. We have "human rights", we should be "sensitive" to life-threatening illnesses, children are told they are "special", our scrotums are somehow "inviolate". Since the tragic 2Day FM saga, we can’t even listen to someone impersonating the Queen with the sound of corgis yapping in the background without feeling a twinge of melancholy. And so, like the weavers before them, like the farriers and the fax machine repairmen, the pranksters are being driven out of their suburban heartlands. Occasionally, though, old-fashioned pranksterism still bubbles up spontaneously from the British heartlands. Last week, for instance, in Teesside. There, John and Wendy Williams retuned from a holiday to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, to find that someone had bricked up their front door. Quickly discarding the hypothesis that Trappist monk squatters had moved in, they realised this was the calling card of their old friend and certified merry prankster Dave Dallin – performing an encore of the bricking-up he’d done when they returned from their honeymoon to the same house, 25 years earlier. “I’m not angry,” said Wendy Williams, surveying the area where her front door had been. “Just tired.” In the preceding 25 years much happiness had no doubt flowed under their bridge, but the energy to deal with the unexpected, they’d found, declines along with bone density. Recriminations and a man with a sledgehammer would come later, but right then, the only emotion available to her was the desire for tea and a sit-down. The fact was that the Williamses couldn’t be angry even if they wanted to: that’s the bullying double-bind of pranksterism. After all, if a prankster is no longer your friend, then you have no choice but to consider what they did as assault and/or criminal damage. Then you have to go to a police station, receive counselling, all the rest. There’s a kind of law of Stockholm Syndrome that binds pranker and prankee closer together, because the alternative is almost always bleaker than laughing it off. Yet more than simply tolerating their zany pal, they should feel privileged to be in contact with one of his declining tribe. In fact we should all learn to appreciate the prankster as a kind of suburban Greek god: a bringer of chaos into otherwise staid lives. The prankster opens the door to the forces of anarchy – but only enough for it to seem refreshing. Like a memento mori made from unravelled toilet paper and green gunge, he reminds us that bad times are always out there. One day it is a potato in the exhaust pipe. Manageable. But the next it could be a cancer diagnosis. Not. One time it is a guy sewing shrimp into your curtains. The next time you lose your job. Shit happens, is his unspoken message. And sometimes, don’t forget, shit can happen to you. The prankster inverts the contents of suburban lives (sometimes literally, by supergluing their furniture to the ceiling), and thereby he pulls them back into focusing on being thankful for what truly matters. For the Williamses, it was a timely lesson about life’s unpredictability, plus another on the importance of doors. How lucky we are to have them. How screwed we’d be without them. Take away doors: How the flip are you gonna get inside your house, pal? “Appreciate doors,” Dallin’s work affirmed.

Admittedly, this was a lesson that the pair already learned 25 years earlier. But if they ever needed a refresher, well, this was probably it.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew.

Previously – Suburban Rebel Kristian Holmes: Boring Dad by Day, Graffiti Gang Kingpin by Night