The enduring social shorthand of Harry Enfield characters

When the LSE published a report about rich, useless children being protected by cash and connections, newspapers illustrated the story with Tim Nice But Dim. Why, 25 years on, are Loadsamoney and Waynetta Slob still go-to references?

The report from the London School of Economics called it “opportunity hoarding”: the way that well-off parents create a “glass floor” to protect their untalented offspring and, in the process, stop the poor from rising up. They were good phrases, but Britain already had a name for it. What the report really described, as the Mail put it, was “the triumph of Tim Nice But Dim”.

There’s perhaps a slender chance that you won’t know who the Mail – along with the Express, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and, naturally, the Guardian – were talking about. Tim Nice But Dim was a character originally created by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, but brought to life by Harry Enfield in a series of sketch shows in the 1990s. Tim put a self-explanatory name and a confused face to something that everyone already knew existed: the thick posh boy (or girl) whose wealth and connections kept him happily ignorant of all the striving in the world.