Student Grant

Student Grant is a cartoon strip created by Simon Thorp for the British comic Viz.^[1] He first appeared in 1992 and became widely popular, featuring regularly for the rest of the decade. The character, created by Simon Thorp, is a University student named Grant Wankshaft, attending the fictional Spunkbridge University, which is not actually a university, in fact a polytechnic. Grant is pretentious, lazy,^[2] smug and conceited, and peppers his speech with the word "actually".^[3] He does little or no work for his degree.

Grant, vainly, thinks of himself as a world-wise liberal intellectual, but is frequently shown as bigoted, not especially bright, and reliant on his parents for money, with little idea about the world outside of campus. He spends money freely but begrudges paying full price for anything because, as he constantly notes "students are really feeling the pinch". He has a number of friends just like him, eager to express their individuality by wearing the same clothes, fashions, invariably ridiculous, like huge hats, bright yellow dungarees and T-shirts with slogans on them like Thunderbirds Are Go! and, in the late 1990s especially, Teletubbies Say 'Eh Oh'!. They are opinionated and talk loudly and ignorantly about various subjects, tagging "...actually!" at the end of their sentences, "proving" their intelligence by listing the grades they got in their A-levels. Several of Grant's collegiate friends have bizarre speech impediments, dental deformities or both.

Grant boasts that he is in the "top 15-to-35 percent of the population", implying that his university is a former polytechnic. He likes to think of himself as in touch with the working classes but is utterly middle class and possesses a latent contempt for non-students in general, regarding them as peasants. This has deservedly resulted in any number of savage beatings.

References

Bibliography

• Donald, Chris. "Rude Kids: The Unfeasible Story of Viz". HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-0071-9096-4