"Santa's gone home. Santa's fucking dead." As theme park slogans go, it's a winner. Sadly, it wasn't the official tagline for Lapland New Forest, the temporary Christmas attraction that was forced to close last week after furious visitors demanded their money back. Instead, the "Santa" line was shouted at a Sun reporter and a "handful of queuing families" by a member of staff disconsolately closing the gates for the last time.

Lapland New Forest sounds like a barrel of laughs. The publicity material promised a glorious winter wonderland replete with animal attractions, an ice rink, log cabins, a nativity scene, a snowy "tunnel of light", and, of course, Santa's grotto. But according to incensed visitors, it turned out to be "little more than a mud-covered car park". They complained that the generator for the ice rink had malfunctioned, turning it into a pool of water, the "tunnel of light" was actually a few fairy lights dangling from trees covered in artificial snow, the nativity was an amateurish billboard, the log cabins were green sheds, and the animal attraction was a handful of reindeer and several "thin-looking huskies chained up in a pen". To keep the kids happy, there was apparently a four-hour queue for Santa's grotto, at the end of which families were charged £10 for a photo with the man himself. Oh, and refreshments weren't cheap either. Five drinks and a baguette would set you back £17.

Many visitors, who'd paid around £25 per ticket, weren't especially impressed, and the mood quickly turned ugly. One of the security guards told the BBC he'd quit, partly because he was "really, really ashamed" to work there, and also because of the level of violence he and the rest of the staff had been subjected to by irate customers. "Santa got attacked," he explained. "One of the elves got smacked in the face and pushed in a pram."

So now it's closed, which is a shame, because it sounds great to me. I love underwhelming theme parks. Slick, showy ones with hi-tech rollercoasters may be entertaining on the day, but really they're all the same. I've been to Euro Disney, Alton Towers and several others in that snazzy corporate vein, but they all blend into one in my memory. Mostly, I remember the queues. Give me a ramshackle DIY attraction any day. Those are the ones that stay with you.

I'll never forget the Concrete Menagerie, for example. Picture Madame Tussauds, but with the celebrity waxworks made out of concrete. And instead of stunning likenesses of the rich and famous, imagine a group of misshapen figurines that were scarcely recognisable as human beings, painted by an especially hamfisted group of GCSE art students in a hurry. That was the Concrete Menagerie. It was housed in the back garden of a house in Northumberland. A full-scale model of Jaws (the shark, not the Bond villain) which resembled a giant grey phlegm glob with eyes was one highlight. Another was a figurine of Lawrence of Arabia sitting astride a camel. Lawrence had a set of real false teeth stuck in his mouth, leaving him with an unsettling rictus grin.

Recently, a friend excitedly recounted a family trip to Collector's World, "a highly popular tourist attraction in Norfolk", according to its website. He, his wife and their offspring got lost on a driving trip and found themselves drawn mysteriously towards it. It consisted of room upon room of bizarre, apparently unrelated artefacts. There was a "Pink Room" dedicated to Barbara Cartland, a telephone museum, a collection of antique cars, some sort of hideous-sounding "gynaecological chair", and best of all, a hall filled solely with memorabilia relating to the actor Liza Goddard, which apparently included pullovers and a mug she'd once drunk out of. Exhilarating and frightening in equal measure, I'd imagine, especially if you're Liza Goddard yourself.

So popular are skewwhiff theme parks, in fact, that there are two whole books devoted to collecting the best of them: Bollocks to Alton Towers and Far From the Sodding Crowd, which contain opening times and travel information for a veritable goldmine of enchanting and/or eccentric attractions, including the British Lawnmower Museum, Gnome Magic, the Margate Shell Grotto, and Cuckooland (a collection of 550 vintage cuckoo clocks). That Lapland New Forest has closed its gates before the team had a chance to include it in a third volume is almost - almost - a national tragedy.

Besides, if they'd somehow managed to keep it going, the weight of publicity its sheer thudding, sprawling crapness has generated over the past week could surely have turned things around, at least in terms of ticket sales. Thousands of people would doubtless have made the ironic pilgrimage, and the worse they'd found it, the better. A disappointing trudge through a car park to be ripped off by a man in an ill-fitting Santa costume.

It's hard to think of a more appropriate Yuletide experience. It's the thought that counts.

• This week Charlie's dismal life continued its sorry descent as he spent the only spare minutes he had obsessively playing Fallout 3, an intensely dispiriting videogame in which you stagger around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland scrabbling for bits of metal and eating radioactive iguana meat in a desperate bid to survive: "What's worrying is that that's my idea of fun right now."