"I think it’s that I look at my whole life and see the awful, terrible things in my life and turn it into something funny. It just happens".
Rupert Pupkin

In Mexico in 1985, just after the calamitous earthquake that struck Mexico City, a superhero appeared. Not the regular comic book type of superhero, mind.

Super Barrio was a squat, fat wrestler, and as far as superhero powers go, he was confined to simply demonstrating his continued existence on planet earth as an organic entity. That said, despite resembling Jockie Wilson, he did sport a particularly fine mask, cloak and lycra suit, complete with SB emblazoned on his chest Superman style. Although he couldn’t perform any feats of unimaginable prowess, he did become that most unusual of cultural hybrids, a wrestler come political activist. Where ever there was trouble SuperBarrio would address the crowd, his mystic and enigma, acting as a perverse focal point around and through which popular opposition was channeled and directed. The people massed to champion their hero, while desperate politicians clambered to have their photograph taken with the masked prophet. A new hero for new times.

Now Scotland’s Harry Butler is no Super Barrio. Let’s get that straight. Harry is purely Mr. Entertainment; he has no aspirations to taking on the multinationals, to tackle the endemic corruption of Scottish local authorities. However Harry shares many of SB’s characteristics. Although separated by geography, culture and time, both share a dogged determination to beat the odds and stay the course. As Harry said during one of his legendary impromptu performances " all you can do is to keep on keeping on". They are also men of mystery, their identities shrouded in rumor and speculation. And more importantly Harry Butler, like Super Barrio is completely devoid of superhero prowess. Harry is an anti hero inversion of all that mythological superhuman, fascistic baloney. While ‘real’ superheroes have utility belts around their waist, Superbarrio just had a thick tire of bulging fat, while Harry, a skinny skeleton coated in white skin just has his BMX bike, his mask, ramp and ring of fire.

Harry Butler is a fantasy. He is the creation of someone who needs to escape from the gray slab boredom of his life. Now some people would no doubt regard a grown man dressing up in a mask, careering around town on a BMX with his cape blowing in the wind, as symptomatic of mental illness, of a pathological inability to face reality, of childish fantasy. They would dismiss it as trite, banal escapist folly. But as, Andy Medhurst the entertaining polemical film theorist once remarked "to use the term escapist as a put down reveals that anyone who does so leads a comfortable life that requires no escaping from".

In Adam Philips book "Houdini’s Box – on the art of escape", the author attempts to unravel why it is that we are so obsessed with ideas of escape, yet so dismissive of such acts of escapist fantasy. For Philips the notion of escapism has received a bum rap: he takes issue with the idea that "strength of character can be straightforwardly equated with the direction in which we run" that "our best selves approach: the timid, the lazy, the deceitful retreat". Philips’ book attempts to offer a more sympathetic account of the impulse to escape, highlighting "why we cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we want to escape to." Harry Butler would provide Philips with volume after volume of material. Some people feel guilty and ashamed about their imaginative fancies of escape, not Harry, he proudly offers them up for public consumption. He may be skinny and small, but he’s my hero.