The fear of being abandoned by one's parents (Hansel and Gretel), or of being destroyed by (or destroying) a parent or sibling – always disguised as, say, a "wicked stepsister" or "stepmother" – recurs again and again, allowing children to access their darker fantasies.
Its evil echo reverberates in this new episode: Sansa refuses to eat, while the wicked King Joffrey is ascendant.
A shot from Mostefa about 30 yards takes a wicked deflection off Jerome Boateng and, with Neuer going the wrong way, fizzes a couple of feet wide of the upright.
In the film, which Ruiz considered not far from Monty Python, John Hurt plays both a wicked marquis and a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs.
"Look at me, Master Knox! Can you believe in your heart I'm as wicked as you say?" she asks him.
On the way we stop to inspect a solitary bunch of flowers, its Cellophane wrapping tied to a wrought-iron railing, a withering memorial to a wicked act.
Or, if you prefer, Goopville, named after the Gwyneth Paltrow site that helped to popularise the notion that if your child enjoyed anything more wicked than a spelt muffin then you weren't taking your parenting duties seriously.
Of course the show is a comedy, so it doesn't bother with the typically gloomy out-of-the-closet story standards like self-loathing or familial rejection (Amy has a southern conservative mother and a wicked step-sister who believes in salvation, but they are only really portrayed as irritants, and she seems to enjoy provoking them).
Villains unworthy of vilification can be found in everything from the Austin Powers comedies, where the insufficiently wicked plans of Dr Evil positively drip bathos, to Skyfall, where Javier Bardem essentially played a neglected son jealous of Bond's relationship with their surrogate mother, M. Children's films have been veering this way for a while.
Just as Labour overcame its distaste for those it would once have seen as rapacious capitalists and wicked press barons, so Tory toffs overcame theirs for people they used to treat as social inferiors.
Stephen Lee is chief executive of liberal thinktank CentreForum Clegg the warrior returned home to share stories about his perilous adventure, and the great battles he and his colleagues have won against those wicked folk, the Tories.
