Sometimes, When You Wear the Scarf

 One of my favourite television shows when I was in university (for my first undergraduate degree) was a short-lived puppet-based show called Don’t Eat the Neighbours. 

I’ve gone through a number of periods in my life when I was able to watch children’s television during the day. There was my own childhood, of course, and then I watched TV with my younger cousins when I was a teenager, and saw the children’s television of their era. My first degree in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my library qualifications in the mid 2000s… All told I’ve got a good 20-30 years worth of children’s television under my belt. These days, thanks to catch-up TV, I’m starting to get another dose, as I watch new classics like Bluey when other people are watching crap like The Bachelor.

 

My first degree, though, was probably the biggest period of children’s television watching outside of my own childhood. My timetable was such that I really only had time to watch TV during the morning, when mothers plonk their kids in front of the set while they try to get the house wrangled into some sort of order. I became such a fan of the first series of Hi-5 that I bought one of their cassettes to play in my car. To this day I can still remember most of the lyrics to “Boom Boom Beat”. 

 

I guess I was old enough to have kids of my own (other girls my age started when they were 19), but I didn’t. I just refused to accept the idea that not being or having a child meant you couldn’t enjoy things that had been created “for children”. I also have a deep an unending love for picture books, which I often borrow from the library. I’m taking them home for myself to read, even though there are no children in my house, because I enjoy them.

 

Don’t Eat the Neighbours involved a family of Canadian wolves who moved to England and found themselves living next door to a family of Rabbits. Both families were headed by single parent fathers, which was interesting, and most plots involved the interaction between a predator and a prey animal in a situation where it was both expected that there would be an altercation, but also kind of rude and unnecessary. There was also a fox, voiced by Simon Callow, who was clearly both gay and highly interested in the father of the Wolf family. It was never quite clear if Wolf noticed, or just thought Fox was his new best friend. They both tried to catch Rabbit (and his best friend, Terrapin) whenever possible, and Rabbit and Terrapin spent their days out witting them.

 

The kids in the families got along well with each other, had no interest in their parents’ petty feuds, and would either thwart the adults’ plans or just do their own thing and ignore them.

 

At one point, the wolf kids were asking Fox a question, which lead to the following exchange:

FOX: Do I look like your mother?

WOLF CUB: Sometimes, when you wear the scarf.

 

This really stuck with me. It stuck with me so much that I used to say it all the time. Whenever my answer to a question was “sometimes”, it just seemed perfectly natural to follow it up with “when you wear the scarf”. It became one of several quotes from obscure children’s television shows that I used to say so often in my university days, that by the time I left uni I had several friends also quoting those shows regularly – even though they had never seen them.

 

Which is fun, I think. The fact that I was constantly quoting things that no one had seen became irrelevant after a while. They stopped caring about the fact that they didn’t share the TV shows with me, because after a while they simply shared the catch-phrases with me, even though they were divorced from their original settings.

 

That’s kind of how catch-phrases work, I guess. I, too, quote things I’ve never seen, because I’ve come across those quotes elsewhere and picked them up along the way. Sometimes, I picked them up after they shifted in meaning slightly from the original. Take “I say it’s spinach, and the hell with it.”

 

Ah, but perhaps that’s another pointless, rambling story.