"Peter Simple" was the pseudonym under which the journalist Michael Wharton wrote a column (variously titled "The Way of the World" or just "Peter Simple") between 1957 and 2006. Using a cast of eccentric characters, he satirised what he considered to be the excesses of modern life.
In its early years, the column also contained extracts from what later became Squire Haggard's Journal by Michael Green.
Tropes present in Peter Simple's columns:
- Accent Slip-Up: The column occasionally visits Lady Chatterley and Mellors of Lady Chatterley's Lover, now some decades older. Mellors has a lucrative career presenting wildlife documentaries on the BBC, and by habit talks standard English, only switching to a Yorkshire accent when he realises a journalist is present.
- Catchphrase: The psychoanalyst Doctor Heinz Kiosk invariably ends his rants with "We are all guilty!"
- Cheating with the Milkman: Parodied in one column, which describes a survey taken in "the notorious Bog Lane Estate, which milkmen until recently visited only in pairs, or even threes, using special high-acceleration electric milk-floats for quick getaway" because of its lustful housewives, who are "of gigantic size and terrifying appearance".
- Good Old Ways: The column sometimes quotes editorials from the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald, which believes society has never been right since the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.
- King in the Mountain: Legend has it that Alderman Foodbotham, mayor of Bradford in The Roaring '20s, lies sleeping in a mountain cave near Northowram, and will one day return to save his city in its hour of greatest need.
- Large and in Charge: Alderman Foodbotham was invariably described as weighing 25 stone (350 pounds).
- Literary Allusion Title: Wharton took his pseudonym from an 1834 novel by Frederick Marryat.
- Mad Scientist: Old Seth Roentgen is a mad agricultural scientist, inventing such devices as a nuclear-powered potato harvester.
- Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Seth Roentgen's daughter Hephzibah, is 18 and a "ravishing sight in a mini-lab coat".
- Take Up My Sword: After Wharton's death, A. N. Wilson tried to continue the column as "Peter Simple II", beginning with a vignette where the original Peter Simple character handed the column over to him before committing suicide. The continuation only lasted for a few weeks.
- The Vicar: The Reverend Dr Spacely-Trellis is an example of the 'Trendy' vicar, forever trying to keep up with the latest fashions in modern thought.
- Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: It is said that Alderman Foodbotham once gave a speech that literally annihilated his opponent "at least to the extent that he disappeared from view and all that was ever seen of him again was a single trouser button picked up months later on Cleckheaton Moor."
