Warming Up

My kids enjoy the cartoonish singing antics of Australian regenerating super group. “The Wiggles”  which means I am watching an awful lot of their recent oeuvre and becoming unhealthily obsessed as usual. This is a bit deeper than my infatuation with Rebecca from Let’s Play or my desire to have sex with Funella from the Furchester Hotel. This show is gnawing into my psyche in a way that I don’t remember feeling since those tragic days where I watched Big Cook, Little Cook in the early hours of the morning straddling the worlds of drunkenness and hangover. That was a little bit more serious I suppose, as I had no kids then, but the world of the Wiggles is just as insidious and all encompassing, with the additional mindfuck that two of the Wiggles began having sex with each other IN REAL LIFE (not that they were doing it in the pretend world of kids’ TV) and got MARRIED and are now getting divorced.

So I scour the show looking for the moment when Lachy and Emma fell in love and also for the moment they fell out of love. And to be fair I am in love with both Lachy and Emma so I can understand how they were forced together in a supernova of antipodean rooting. And they also both terrify me so I can understand why they’d want to get away from each other too. Except they can’t. Because they are still both in the Wiggles. 

Lachy and Emma might be newcomers to the Wiggles and come close to producing a Wiggle off spring imbued with wiggledom, but they are also the two most engaging performers. Simon and Anthony might be slightly more like two Australian men who have stumbled into a multi-million dollar super group, but the more you see, the more you like them. I mean you wouldn’t want to imagine them having sex with each other. But in some ways that is not the main function of kids TV. Only in some ways though.

Anthony has been a Wiggle since the start and I believe investors made it a condition of the line-up change (once the Wiggles were all men and there was no danger then of them fucking each other and producing tiny Wiggles - and yet they call this progress) that Anthony stayed on. Which is fine. He’s got a good sense of fun and likes pulling the necessary cult-like face of happiness. But that’s the thing. I feel like I am trapped in a netherworld watching it, but believe the Wiggles might be too. They are so happy and silly and perhaps they have been brainwashed.

There’s a bit in the Wiggle Town special where Anthony introduces himself and then adds incredulously, “My hair’s turning grey.” But it’s not like it’s a jokey nod to how long he’s been going. It’s like he’s had a moment of existential understanding. For one second the real Anthony has managed to fight his way out of the one possessed by the alien Wiggle and he sees himself and can not understand why his appearance has changed, because from his perspective only seconds have passed since the possession, not the decades that he’s been singing about Dorothy the Dinosaur and Captain Feathersword… But then he is under the spell again before he can escape.

Good luck to all of these people. They are excellent performers and their way of making a living  is only slightly more stupid than my own (though a million times more lucrative).

Their songs haunt my brain all day, even when I am not watching the show, their smiles have burned into my retina. 

I love them, I want to be one of them, but I am aware that they are a force of pure evil that will destroy the earth.

And good news people of the future. The Headmaster’s Son is now available as a super cheap download. Get it here.