Random thoughts

She’s back!

A few weeks ago, guest blogger extraordinaire BelgianWaffling shared her patented, highly scientific classification of children’s TV, based on her extensive research as the idle, unfit parent of two small boys.

This week she tackles:

Programmes adults like and children don’t.

1. Progammes from their own childhood.

Parents look back misty eyed to the television of their youth and will insist, despite any quantity of evidence to the contrary, it represents a golden age, whether that age is composed of a laudanum crazed lady in tweed with cut glass vowels talking to a hand puppet, or She-Rah Princess of Power. I have myself been guilty of attempting to interest my children in Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss, programmes that give me warm fuzzy feelings of nostalgia and evoke a simpler time when my greatest pleasure was to be allowed to eat penny chews in front of the TV, blah, blah blah cue the Hovis music. The children are stonily indifferent, verging on disdainful. Words like ‘boring’ and ‘no like it’ are bandied about without the slightest regard for my feelings. I tell myself they will remember their own cruelty when they are fruitlessly trying to interest their children in the glory of Pokemon.Well, they probably won’t. But I will remind them from my special crone corner, putting my teeth in and setting my bottle of gin down all the better to shriek “You were exactly the same!”.

2. Programmes with characters to perv over

This alone serves to redeem a number of programmes that would otherwise be unbearable for parents. The pages of parenting websites are filled with mothers discussing which presenter they would like to see naked, or whether Daddy Pig would be better in bed than Noddy. Crush objects need not even be humanoid. I myself have nourished a long standing Thing for Makka Pakka, the felt coated obsessive compulsive troglodyte from In the Night Garden. I truly feel we are a good match and that we would compliment each other marvellously. I would help him with his stone sorting and sleep next to him on his stone bed, stroking his prominent ear nodules. I have it all worked out. Unfortunately, after a brief dalliance with In the Night Garden, my children have definitively rejected it, and make unbearably pitched shrieking noises whenever it comes on. My love is doomed. This pattern is played out again and again - you watch something with your children and form an attachment to a character, then your children reject the programme entirely and you will never see the object of your affections again. Parenting is cruel.

3. Educational programmes

All parents nurture a nagging chestful of guilt about the amount of TV their children watch. Well, all parents apart from the saintly (and frankly deranged) one who will not let their children watch at all, and instead play improving, family friendly games with them. Their time for guilt will come when their children move out at the age of twelve to live in a crack den just because it has Sky.

The way the rest of us cope with our guilt is to tell ourselves that TV is educational. The best kind of programmes for us, then, are the ones that give the illusion of teaching our children something, whether it be a foreign language (holà, Dora!), maths (Numberjacks), the alphabet (Sesame Street), geography, natural history, philosophy, quantum physics… There are programmes for all of these now, and as a rule children despise them, immediately seeing through these attempts at education thinly disguised as entertainment. This genre has been taken to its logical, but frankly insane, conclusion with the ‘Baby Einstein’, series, a hallucinogenic set of images set to improving classical music “scientifically proven” to give babies larger brains. Or something.

4. The truth

The truth, and parents’ guilty secret, is that we actually like anything that stops our children trying to tear each other’s heads off or set fire to the cat and that gives us a few precious minutes to lie in a darkened room with a large glass of wine, however devoid of artistic or intellectual merit. However, this must never be admitted, and instead we all maintain the party line that ‘They don’t watch tv at all, really, I only let them watch improving age appropriate documentaries on the great artists of the twentieth century, and only for 5 minutes a day’. Without this fiction our thin veneer of parental authority would disappear entirely. So just, you know, shh, ok? It’s nearly time for Sonic the Hedgehog.

Catch up with part 1 of this series.

Are you developing an animated series? As the Brothers McLeod will tell you, it’s no easy feat. To help you on your way, 4mations is bringing you a series of posts by guest blogger royalty BelgianWaffling, whose in-depth knowledge of children, plastic toys, and, errr, Belgium is sure to tickle your funny bone. She’s here to tell you all about children’s TV. So listen up.

Based on my extensive research as the idle, unfit parent of two small boys, I have developed a patented classification system for children’s television programmes. Yes, I suppose whilst I was doing this I could have been teaching my children how to speak Japanese or play the viola. No matter. From the fateful moment when, as babies, they learnt to distinguish between repeats of Australian soap operas and the Tellytubbies, my children have ruled the remote control with a rod of iron. All I can do is observe and complain. I am good at complaining.
Children’s tv falls into four categories:

•    Programmes children like and adults hate;
•    Programmes adults like and children hate;
•    Programmes everyone hates;
•    Programmes everyone likes.

In the first of this occasional series, I will be telling you about programmes children like and adults hate.

Read the rest of this entry »