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.

The Laziest Person in Lazy Town

Here is one of the great paradoxes of children’s television:  Sporticus is the laziest person in Lazy Town.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lazy Town, it’s a weird show set in a town populated by puppets.  No one seems to have a clear reason for doing what they are doing, so the whole thing is a bit mysterious, but here’s the basic set-up.  Stephanie (not a puppet) moves in with her uncle (a puppet) and discovers that the town is full of kids (all puppets) who don’t know how to play outside.  She sets about creating a better play culture.

"Wtl5" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia 

There is a villain, Robbie Rotten (not a puppet, but wearing make-up that makes him look a bit puppet-like), who doesn’t like hearing kids play (no one knows why) and keeps coming up with ridiculous schemes to get them to avoid kicking a football around together.  There’s also a hero, Sporticus (not a puppet, and also known as 10 but no one knows why), who lives in an airship and comes down into the town to help the kids thwart Robbie Rotten’s plans and jump around and dance.

Sporticus is supposed to be the embodiment of physical activity, while Robbie Rotten is the embodiment of laziness.  Sporticus is constantly jumping around and playing with sporting equipment.  Heck, the man can’t even walk anywhere – he has to backflip.  Meanwhile, Robbie Rotten sits in a comfy chair and scowls at things that interrupt his nap.

However, when you come to the crunch, Robbie Rotten is actually the most industrious and active person in Lazy Town, while Sporticus is uber lazy.

Okay, sure, Sporticus opens the door with a high-kick and commutes from his airship to town by pedalling some sort of flying bike, but he doesn’t actually *do* anything.  Most of his day-to-day needs are handled by his ship, and he just presses a button or barks a command.  If he wants an apple, he doesn’t even bother walking anywhere to get it.  He just shouts “apple!” and holds his hand out expectantly.

Meanwhile, Robbie Rotten actually puts in a lot of hard work to accomplish what he wants.  If he wants a trap in the ground, he picks up a shovel and digs it himself.  If he thinks building a wall will stop those pesky kids from playing, he actually builds a wall – all by himself, moving the large blocks into place with his own hands and using a trowel to put it together.  And it’s a good wall, too.  He could just slap up some bricks, but instead he builds a proper stone wall with a gatehouse and parapets.  And he accomplishes this overnight!

Sporticus may jump on the buttons in his air-ship rather than just pushing them with his hand like a normal person, but that doesn’t discount the fact that he is pressing a button instead of walking to the kitchen and making his own breakfast.  As for Robbie – he actually gets involved and does stuff.

For my money, Robbie Rotten is the better role model if you are trying to convince people to be active, rather than lazy.

There's a Bear in There

I've been a bit philological for my last couple of posts, so I thought I'd break it up a bit by talking about Playschool.

I was watching an episode while eating breakfast a few weeks ago, and Justine was showing the viewers how the lights in the studio can change the look of the set...

And suddenly I realised just how simple the Playschool set-up really was. The whole thing is just a cyclorama with some flats representing trees (for outside) or a wall with a window (for inside). Beyond that, it's just a small handful of props and a few well-placed lights.

So, I was looking at this, thinking: "Good Lord, you could do this in your basement (if you had a basement)!" Heck, the entire musical accompaniment is just one piano!

And this is possibly the most popular and long-running show in Australian television history (apart from the news). It's one of the longest running children's shows in the world.

So, now I have this powerful urge to rip of the Playschool model (not the format, because that would be a copyright infringement) and make an incredibly cheap children's show in someone's backyard. Maybe I can convince JCU to let me use the Cowshed Theater, or something. It wouldn't take that much effort to convert it to a sound stage...

Oh, and if I make it bilingual, I can try to sell it to SBS. I reckon an English/Italian preschoolers' TV show with books, games, stories, songs and arts-and-crafts projects would go down a treat with the SBS crowd.

All I need is a catchy theme tune, some charismatic bilingual hosts and some helpful Italian mothers to provide the songs...