Newspapers of the late 1940s and 1950s often use both terms in the same article about the same person when dealing with ticket touts, fraudsters, and black market traders.
An early use of the term was in the 1933 film Friday the Thirteenth, where the character, played by Max Miller, a loud, quick-witted, Cockney market trader, is heard to say "I'm the widest boy ever put on a pair of shoes!"
[4][5] Fictional wheeler-dealer characters such as Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, Frank Butcher from "EastEnders", Private Walker from Dad's Army, Jim London from Up the Elephant and Round the Castle, Vincent Swan from White Gold, and Flash Harry from the St Trinian's films, all exemplify various wide boy "types".
Kevin Mooney, formerly of Adam and the Ants, formed the short-lived band Wide Boy Awake in 1982 who disbanded after a couple of EPs.
The Tom Robinson Band referenced a "wide boy kicking in a window" as one of several examples of social unrest in their 1978 single "Up Against the Wall."