The Importance of Being Idle

We're All On Drugs

Its quite apparent looking back what a massive quantity of psychedelics I absorbed as a child, purely through the medium of kids TV. Being born at the tail end of the sixties, and having my formative years in the 70s, the kind of TV I watched as a kid was utterly fucking bonkers. The Banana Splits was probably the worst offender of the lot, but there it wasn't alone by any stretch of the imagination. Tales of the Riverbank is unhinged in a gentle, English sort of way, Button Moon was barking, and the less said about the likes of The Singing Ringing Tree the better. The Singing Ringing Tree also opened up a whole new world of European weirdness, which incorporates such things as the Moomins and Ludwig (which as I recall was about a diamante egg that lived in a tree...) and of course the amazing Pingu!
Of course it wasn't all bad, pretty much anything that Oliver Postgate was associated with was utter genius (my worship of Bagpuss is well known, but lets not forget the dark, fairytale genius of Noggin the Nog).
Oddly I remember being very scared of Mary, Mungo and Midge when I was a kid. I think there may be a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, they lived on the top floor of a high-rise building, and I'd never seen anything like that in real life, so that just seemed very odd and unnerving to me. Also, this was a world without adults, and that too was a very scary place. Oh yeah, it should be made clear at this point that Mary was a little girl, about seven or eight years old, Mungo was her dog and midge was a mouse. I was probably about six, seven years old myself, and the stark, empty world that MM&M presented was not at all appealing to me, in fact it had a lot of resonance with the grim 'Protect and Survive' films trying to convince us we could somehow make it through a nuclear war by hiding behind a door. I recently saw the 'P&S' films again, when I was at the Imperial War Museum with Emily (she wanted to go there!), and whilst she seemed to think they were funny (which I suppose they are in their naivety), they scared the crap out of me all over again, nearly thirty years later.
On the plus side, I think Sesame Street was, and is, a work of unadulterated genius. It teaches, in a very un-patronising way, about acceptance. You see all these different people, some of them not people at all, living together, co-operating with each other, and respecting each others differences. I think a lot more people should watch the show, and learn the lessons it teaches.

posted by BadMonkey @ 10:37 PM