Bastards on Kids' TV

Kids’ TV shows over the last few decades have been as much a breeding ground for bastards as my boxer shorts are for bacteria. We may well feel nostalgic for the halcyon days of our youth, spent arse-to-carpet, inches from a TV screen that baked the irises in our dead-looking eyes; but did we ever consider just how vile and cruel some of our idols were?

Easily the worst was Mr Benn. Here was a man whose face would have been a regular feature on Crimewatch had it been on telly in the early 70’s. If the police were searching for a serial killer, then Mr Benn ticked every box on the profile. He was approaching middle age, lived alone, was unemployed, had no friends or close relatives, loved dressing up and was a complete fantasist. Who knows who was buried under the paving slabs in the back yard of 52 Festive Road? Even more unsavoury was the fact that he lived in a street full of children. I’m sure their parents told them never to accept sweets from the funny man in the bowler hat and pinstripe suit. But I bet he offered; the nonce.

The fact that Mr Benn undertook some form of moralistically saccharin good deed on every adventure behind that changing room door should not fool you into believing that he was totally altruistic. The thieving bastard usually nicked something to stick on his mantelpiece back home. And he never told the shopkeeper what had happened to him. If he had any concern for other people’s health and safety, he’d have reported the risk - any other customer could easily wander into a different world and be eaten by a dinosaur or attacked by a dragon. All he had to say was, “You want to get that door fixed mate,” but he never did, the selfish git.

Another bastard from that time was that fat sloth Bagpuss. Look, he’s the only fucker in the shop who gets to go outdoors, but all he does is lie on his saggy arse and sleep. And then, when Bagpuss wakes up, all the other toys in the shop wake up, discover something that’s broken, discuss what to do and then work together to fix it. Does Bagpuss help? No fucking way. Lazy shyster. Imagine if Gabriel the Frog fell off his shelf and suffered internal haemorrhaging; Bagpuss would just sit there and let him die. If the frog was close enough, Bagpuss would probably then eat him. If he wasn’t such a sack of inertia he’d have attacked and eaten all the mice on the mouse organ and Professor Yaffle ages ago.

But Emily loved him. And I bet she was an obese, slothful and spoilt little cow as well.

I think I don’t trust quiet people very much. Mr Benn said very little, and the same with Bagpuss. Add to that list Bod. Yes, Bod, that androgynous agent for the Khmer Rouge, the silent assassin of Middle-English agricultural folk, the inspiration for Chucky, the cold-blooded evil-faced matchstick-legged bastard. He made Damian from The Omen look like Jake from Tweenies. Here comes Bod… quick, shoot the fucker in the head before he harms us, he’s the bastard son of Pol Pot and a jackal.

Mind you, the worst of all the silent bastards was Sooty. The fact that ITV refused to transmit the things he whispered in Matthew Corbett’s ear suggests that it was pure hatred and filth. Corbett had to play this charade that Sooty was saying something nice and innocuous rather than some obscenity regarding his deviant carnal desires for Sue or a remark about how he wanted to torture Sweep, medieval-style.

“Oh really Sooty? He says he’d like to play a game with you Sweep.”
Meaning that he wanted to stab Sweep in the head with infected syringes, set fire to his squeaker and force him up a cow’s arse with a broom-handle.

This epidemic of bastards in kids’ TV shows was not consigned to my childhood in the 70’s. When my own children were young, I was once more confronted with bastardness in sheep’s clothing, particularly in Teletubbies and Balamory.

It wasn’t any particular Teletubby, nor was it even Noo-Noo that made me uncomfortable and afraid for the safety of my children. It was the weird woman who had tea parties in the woods – Funny Lady. Fuck me, she was a bunny-boiler and a half! You suspected that her motive was to ingratiate herself with children in order to gain access to one of the Dads, initiate an affair, murder the wife and sell the kid into slavery in a Mumbai shanty town. Not very funny, Funny Lady!

As for Balamory, well, where do you start? Miss Hoolie the nursery teacher - whose teeth originally belonged to someone with a much larger head - was clearly suffering the usual mental tribulations of a stereotypical single, friendless, bullied-at-school, emotionally retarded, mildly unattractive women in her 20’s. You knew something was going to snap one day and she’d drive a bus-load of her pupils off the edge of a cliff after being sexually spurned by the dribblingly inept PC Plum.

Balamory is full of bastards. Even worse than Miss Hoolie is Suzie Sweet who runs the shop. She has Paul Daniels’s expression, cold-eyes with over-compensating grin, the face that tells you she is the Scottish coastal village sweet shop version of Voldemort. And don’t be fooled by Archie, pink jumper-wearing aristocratic inhabitant of the pink castle (literally, not figuratively.) Between them you can imagine a plot whereby they racially purify the village by fooling PC Plum into arresting Josie Jump and Spencer the painter and then get Edie McRedie to set up Balamory’s own Guantanamo Bay in which Jump and Spence are tortured as terror suspects because they are black and therefore must be Muslims.