Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted — that’s why kids love it

It is very difficult, watching a Thomas the Tank Engine dvd with your young children, to escape the suspicion that the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was anything other than a thoroughly vindictive and authoritarian old scrote, with a spiteful streak the width of the Fat Controller’s stomach. You would not leave your kids with him in person. The errant rolling stock are subjected to ghastly punishments and humiliations — including one engine being bricked up in a tunnel for months on end while the others laugh at him.

As the Canadian academic Shauna Wilton pointed out recently, the programme does indeed ‘promote(s) a rigid class system that stifles self-expression’, as well as being sexist: the only females — Sodor, Annie and Clarabel — are carriages and are pulled by the males. None of the engines are poofs, although Henry’s livery seems to me a little camp and you can imagine the unctuous Thomas doing a spot of cottaging in his spare time, unwisely propositioning policemen, asking for his funnel to be polished and so on.