‘At 17% abv, we’re confident that ‘Wifebeatre’ is really going to pack a punch,’ said marketing director Peter Houghey. ‘The British have always admired the French. We love their chic style, their joie de vivre and their willingness to drink all day and abuse strangers. As a brand we want to tap into those values and claw back some of the ground we’ve recently lost to meths and Toilet Duck.’

The move comes as no surprise to industry experts. ‘Stella Artois are keen to build on the success of ‘Cidre’, their French-sounding apple-flavoured tramp fuel that now dominates the crucial town-centre and bus-shelter markets,’ said one drinks analyst. ‘As the advert says, ‘C’est Wifebeatre, not Wifebeater. Express your love with a Gallic je ne sais quoi.’’

Stella Artois had faced criticism after introducing a 4% lager last year, with many questioning the label’s commitment to promoting irresponsible drinking and violent domestic discord. But Houghey is confident ‘Wifebeatre’ has really silenced the critics – often because they’ve been knocked unconscious by people who’ve drunk it.

‘The drink is best served ice-cold to neutralise any rogue flavour that may have crept in during transit,’ explained Houghey. ‘A cold can of the beer also makes a perfect ice pack for black eyes, and each one comes with a range of suggested excuses for those difficult-to-explain injuries: she walked into a door, she ran into my fist, she spilt my last Stella.’

Despite the high-profile launch, members of the Campaign for Real Ale have slammed the new drink claiming the campaign is tasteless. But Houghey dismissed the criticism. ‘Most of that lot haven’t even spoken to a girl. They’re just bittre.’

‘Alice in Sunderland is very much like the original novels,’ said Professor Terry Eagleton. ‘It might be grittier and racier, but it contains the same trademark cast of unbelievable characters performing inexplicably bizarre pastimes. I don’t think I’d be spoiling the ending for the readers to say that the things they will witness in these pages could only have happened in a dream.’

As with Carroll’s first novel, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, the action begins with the young heroine lazing by a river one summer afternoon. ‘Only this time Alice is a teenager and she’s spread-eagled on a bench beside the River Wear, her soporific state explained by the two dozen empty bottles of WKD and vodka whose DRINK ME labels she had no choice but to obey.’

With an air of unreality common to all Carroll’s novels, Alice is then led into a strange and beguiling place, Sunderland town centre, by an oddly-dressed white rabbit – her classmate Chantelle who is late for her shift as a bunny girl at the Blu Bambu nightclub. Here she witnesses all sorts of bizarre goings on, including men wearing short sleeves in January, people urinating in shop doorways and, in celebration of the city’s victory over Middlesbrough in the local derby, sporadic outbreaks of singing and violence.

After accepting a mushroom from a stranger in a bar, Alice then meets a host of mythical creatures, including a miner and a shipbuilder with whom she forms such a strong bond in the high street in the early hours of the morning that all three are arrested on public decency charges. In the novel’s final scene Alice pleads with magistrates for her trial to be dismissed on the grounds that ‘all persons a mile high should leave court’, but she is taken away to a police cell where she eventually wakes from her reverie.

‘To outsiders the whole episode will look fantastical and other-worldly, but the author’s skill is that it has the certain but unfathomable logic of a dream,’ said Professor Eagleton. He is now continuing his search for the rumoured sequel to Alice Through the Looking Glass describing a hen weekend in Gateshead.

The scheme allows cash-strapped families to receive pre-loaded recycling tubs filled with premium-label empties such as Tanqueray No. Ten gin, Glenlivet 21-year-old single malt whisky and a selection of classic English ales to put in front of their houses for collection the following day, concealing the reality that they will be attempting to sustain their drunken haze over the holidays with Sainsbury’s ‘basics’ range vodka and cooking sherry.

This follows a broadly successful pilot scheme run last year, although the council’s initial offer to lend residents cardboard boxes from high-end electronics goods to leave in their front drives was withdrawn after a spate of burglaries that resulted in the council facing legal action from both the victims and the burglars, who claimed false advertising.

Feedback is generally positive, with one user commenting anonymously, ‘People expect to see something decent in your [recycling] tub, especially over Christmas and the New Year – a bottle or two of Veuve Clicquot, some Bombay Sapphire. Word gets round pretty quickly if you’ve just put out a few empty PET bottles of White Lightning.’

However, it’s not just residents’ blushes the scheme is saving – supporters believe that a better class of empties can increase a house’s ‘kerb appeal’, thus boosting property prices, and if this year’s roll-out is successful, the council plans to extend the programme to replacing all the empty Carlsberg Special Brew cans in neighbourhood parks and shrubs with high-end Belgian beer bottles, such as Chimay Blanche-Tripel and Duvel.

‘It’s a win-win situation,’ claimed council spokesman, Simon Craig. ‘We gentrify neighbourhoods, residents can keep up appearances and we get to put these glass containers to good use rather than just mixing them with the other rubbish and chucking them in the land-fill like we usually do.

22 December 2010

‘And the mouth on some of them… I recently remonstrated with one such young woman, asking her what sort of a man she hopes to attract by singing Mozart arias in the middle of the street. ‘I know not, gentle sir,’ she replied, ‘but may he have a thousand pounds a year and a sizeable estate in Derbyshire!’ Of course I threw her arse in the cells, the cheeky bitch.’

As reports of unbearably repressed sexual tension continue to dominate the headlines, victim support groups are keen to warn girls against the dangers of being overly flighty and coquettish. ‘Vulnerable young girls are leaving themselves wide open to approaches from bounders, highly inappropriate suitors and some downright villainous knaves,’ said a representative from Cadwatch, who offer a full range of counseling services to any girl who has been grossly misled as to the true nature of a gentleman’s character.

‘Every day we field calls from girls who have brought shame and disgrace upon their family name and quite ruined their sisters’ chances of making good marriages, purely on the promise of a moonlit elopement and a new bonnet.’

But many are quick to lay blame with education’s obsession with bombarding impressionable girls with images of gentler times and quaint manners. ‘It’s this stuff they read at school,’ said one mother, who is on her final warning from social services for allowing her teenage daughter to promenade unchaperoned in the Woking Peacock Centre. ‘All their mates are reading it and suddenly they’re off down Bluewater for the latest tulle-tucker. But it could be worse I suppose. On some of the streets round here, you’re lucky to go a few feet without getting caught up in a sabre duel, so we’re grateful for small mercies.’