COMMENT: Dudley Eye: Who is laughing now Piers Morgan?

If this is true, then I'm afraid I am about to prove that I am not a true winner.

A few weeks back, when the DY Eye opened to the public, it was roundly pilloried at a national level.

Phrases like 'worst tourist attraction in the UK' were bandied about. People, who know nothing of the fair borough of Dudley, guffawed at the absurdity of some random town steeped in industrial history having the cojones to believe it deserved its own version of the London Eye.

How dare such an eyesore town have such delusions of grandeur!

As we all know by now, the DY version quickly attracted its own celebrity knocker, in the rather chubby form of Piers Morgan.

He opened up his big, permanently-set-to-instant-controversy gob to splurge forth a torrent of snooty mockery in our Eye's direction. The national consensus was the Eye was a ridiculous folly, doomed to rotate apologetically for a couple of weeks and then roll off into the nearest canal to die a rusty and ignominious death.

Well – and this is where being a poor winner comes in – to Mr Morgan and his chortling minions, I have this to say, in the manner of Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons: "HA HA!"

Because, for all the brickbats and barbs hurled its way, the DY Eye proved to be such a soaring success it had its run extended, in the manner of a hit Broadway musical, to cope with the demand for places.

To paraphrase the great Bob Monkhouse: They laughed at us when we said we wanted to put a great big Ferris wheel in Dudley. Well, they're not laughing now.

What are we to make of all this? They do say all publicity is good publicity, so could it be that when Piers launched his broadside against the Eye, he was actually performing for it the greatest single act of PR for which it could ever have wished?

After all, this is a man who could enter a popularity contest with Pol Pot and Sepp Blatter and fully expect to leave with the third place rosette.

Personally, I think it goes deeper than that. I think that the Morgan vs DY Eye episode represented the moment the Black Country worm turned. I think it was the point our people said: "Okay, ENOUGH. We've had enough of the constant opprobrium of our nation's professional wafflers. The Dudley Eye deserves to be a hit, and we're going to make sure it happens!"

And we did. We made sure the thing everyone was chuckling at was a sensational success. We rose up against those who railed against us, and we won.

Okay, here comes a grand statement.

In a nutshell, I believe that the Eye may have kick-started a Black Country cultural uprising.

Let's not sugar-coat it, we, as a region, come in for a shocking amount of stick from the rest of the country, particularly London, even more particularly the bits of London where people don't need proper jobs and instead spend all their time doing 'think thanks' and 'behavioural studies'.

If you listened to such people you would a) have to be insane and b) think the Black Country is some kind of feral urban purgatory where nothing good ever happens and everybody is so miserable that smiling causes us physical discomfort.

Generally, we take all this with a pinch of salt. We've heard it all before. It has become background noise, as easy to tune out as the sound of traffic and birdsong.

But, if you kick a dog enough times, it will turn on you. The grand success of the DY Eye may not have left Piers Morgan literally savaged (more's the pity), but it has made him look like a bit of a humourless buffoon – the cultural commentator's equivalent of a damn good kicking. As a region, the Black Country played the whole thing perfectly.

They sneered at us, we laughed. And in the heirarchy of humour, laugh beats sneer every time. This week will be interesting in the Black Country as the city of Wolverhampton votes to decide whether or not to go forward with plans to stage a literary festival here.

I, for one, hope that the motion is unanimously supported, but I can already hear the roars of mirth emitting from more enlightened enclaves of the chattering classes when it is.

"A literary festival in Wolverhampton? Do they HAVE books in the West Midlands? Can they even READ?"

I'm in no doubt some wags will adopt this hilarious angle, despite the fact one of the UK's best-selling authors, Caitlin Moran, comes from here and the region has a thriving poetry scene keeping the local dialect alive and vibrant.

Well. I say, let the wags wag. Let them wag every time the Black Country has ideas above its perceived station, because every time they do, we will galvanise. We will mobilise. We will win. Won't we Piers?

You can laugh at our accents if you like – we're well aware they can sound a bit funny from time to time. You can laugh at our impenetrable dialect. You can laugh at our odd local cuisine (make no bones about it, Groaty Dick is a dish that deserves to be laughed at) and our hapless football teams.

But when you mock us for having the temerity to form these grand ideas, giant wheels that touch the sky and literary beanos to feed the mind, then you are tacitly saying: Know your place, Black Country.

And that is why we are going to keep having them.