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Back in my drunken days I would often wake at 5am, confused and afraid and be unable to get back to sleep and end up watching CBeebies to try and calm me down from my existential dread. Of course it just drove me closer to insanity as I became obsessed with Balamory and Big Cook Little Cook. Even though I was a man in his later thirties with no children.
Nowadays I am rubbish at drinking (my wife and I have decided to go on a health kick and give up booze for 100 days - we’re two days in now and it’s going really well!), but I still have to wake up early to look after my stupid baby (why did I give up those fun old carefree days of waking up alone and speculating about how Big Cook and Little Cook had met?). And when it’s my early morning duty I bring her downstairs and we watch CBeebies. Which is OK now, because there is a child with me. Once again I realise that the key to never having to grow up and to remain infantilised is to have a baby. Then you can do all the cool baby stuff you wanted to do, but pretend it’s for your child.
I really enjoy the programmes. In fact occasionally I am so transfixed by Justin’s ability to turn any situation into a self-impose slapstick mishap that I forget to watch my daughter and she wanders off into potential peril. Don’t tell my wife though. She thinks I am a good dad.
There is some fun pre-8am tweeting to be done where other sleep-deprived parents of small children can enjoy discussing which CBeebies shows annoy them, before the norms have woken up (occasionally some sad idiot who spend their day trawling back through tweets they missed will tweet back twelve hours later and complain that you’re writing about something that they don’t understand and mock you for catering for other parents, but you know, maybe they should take a look at their own life where they think everything must be targeted at them alone). It’s one of the things that helps get us through. Though I think most of them do not enjoy CBeebies as much as I do.
Still it’s fun to try and collate what is the most annoying show to watch as an adult. I am a big anti-fan of Mike the Knight. Not only is he an annoying character with no redeeming features, the cartoon is also bollocks and the theme tune terrible. Yet every episode they turn it around, because the closing theme is one of the best songs of all time. I don’t know why they have two themes and why they relegate the best song to the closing credits when it should obviously replace the opening credits and also the entire show. Though I suspect they are playing a clever game with us all. By putting something genuinely good at the end of the show, you are left on such a high that you forget all that has gone before. And by keeping the theme short you are looking forward to seeing more tomorrow. It’s subconscious so you don’t really realise it, but when Mike the Knight comes on the next day something inside you is telling you not to turn off. You can’t quite remember the closing theme, but you know that you want to hear it again, so you sit through all the stupid shit about dragons and trolls (without then Game of Thrones style sex scenes to keep that interesting - not that I want to see Mike the Knight having sex, I am not sick). It’s very clever work from the Mike the Knight team. But it’s annoying because the end theme proves they are capable of making something that transcends art, but they aren’t prepared to put the work in for more than 30 seconds.
Anyway, sorry to bring this debate into the world of the early morning sleepers, but my three most annoying CBeebies characters are 3 Raa Taa the noisy lion 2 Mike the Knight 1. Bing.
The actual show Bing is OK and it has fucking Mark Rylance in it as the incredibly patient Flop (and I love the fact that it never tries to explain its strange world of cartoon animals being cared for by soft toys), but Bing is a dick and I want to punch him in his stupid face. Which I think is the intention of the creators of Bing. It’s cathartic for parents who have to deal with their own stupid toddlers to see a more annoying one.
I have started following the fifth US President to be assassinated, Donald Trump on Twitter. I think I have anyway, he’s got a blue tick, but it reads like a parody account. Today he tweeted- "Obama says a WALL at our southern border won't enhance our security (wrong) and yet he now wants to build a much bigger wall (fence) at W.H.” Not only is the clarification of fence pretty funny, but the fact that this guy can argue that a higher wall around a property is in any way similar to building a wall between two countries would be funny if he wasn’t so close to being in charge. By this logic we should build a wall in space around the earth to protect us from aliens. And we should make the Mexicans pay for it. Why not? That’s the best way to get votes.
Here's my latest newsletter, with the news that Tim Minchin will be a RHLSTP guest again on 18th July.
