The Newcastle-based adult comic Viz used Tipton as a perennial butt of jokes throughout the 1990s, involving a fictitious councillor, Hugo Guthrie. Guthrie may, however, have been based on the real inter-war figure of Councillor Doughty who forbade any more pubs to open until one was opened carrying his name — now renamed the Pie Factory — and apparently when asked by his Town Clerk whether the then Council should buy a urinal for the town park, instructed him to buy two so we can breed from them.
Tipton was described by the BBC during the 2000 West Bromwich West by-election as; "one of the few places in Britain with no middle-class".
