Gazing into the TV world of children ...

Press, 14 October 1986, Page 11

Gazing into the TV world of children ...

What are our very young children learning from their special programmes? The 30 minutes from 3 p.m. to 3.30 on Mondays and Wednesdays give some indication. While half an hour of this sort of thing may pass in a flash for the average four-year-old, for the jaded reviewer it approximates an eternity.

It began with “Wil Cwac Cwac,” who is a Welsh duck — had his creator been more alert, he could have been a rabbit. Anyway, said duck plays out the drama of his life through the voice of Myfanwy Talog, whose name shall remain without further comment. However, a duck who sounds like Gladys from “He de hi” takes the imagination.

In fact, this is “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” for the infants. There is a cockerel' from Birmingham and a chicken from Liverpool, if her accent is to be believed. And they were even mixing flour and water to a paste to mend a broken china dog. Cwac Cwac (or is it Barry?) ended up in the tub of paste and was then sent to bed with a double dose of medicine for being clumsy.

From this tale of Gothic horror, it was into “Mooncat and Co,” which is a programme of moral education from Yorkshire. Stephen is a shopkeeper who has a big blue mooncat for a pet friend. It

began with a truly horrible five minutes all about being bright and breezy and singing songs at full pitch first thing in the morning. Mooncat, showing some sense in spite of being blue, kept wanting to go back to bed, although very good-na-turedly.

It takes a special sort of person to sing brightly to a puppet, but even this one could not keep it up for long. Instead it was into the educational part. “Most shopkeepers have to get up early, especially those who sell newspapers.” Not in New Zealand they don’t, so a whole generation could then have been confused by the little documentary which followed, showing British newsagents marking up their papers for the paperboys at 4.30 a.m.

Not surprisingly, Mooncat could only take so much of this before he needed someone to tell him a story, thus putting us back with some more talking animals. A rabbit and a mole did a lot of hopping and skipping along the road and had earnest discussions about milk bottles, breakfast and bed. The educational bit was about moles being nocturnal “dooh, what’s that?” For the local audience, they might well have added, “oooh, what’s a mole?” But “when they had finished, they brushed away the crumbs and washed up the dishes.”

This is all very well, two programmes teaching our youngsters all manner of pro-social behaviour, with no hint of murder and mayhem. A far cry from “The Equalizer.” The worst that could happen is that, armed with

the information that animals can talk, albeit about pretty boring things, the little ones might start poking the cat to get him to say a few words. But “Tales from Fat Tulip’s Garden” was a very different matter.

A zany story teller, who made Mooncat’s Stephen look like Julie Andrews, used words, sound and actions to tell us (us, you notice; if you can’t beat them, join them) about the decidedly stupid Fat

Tulip. Gone was the moralising and the education. Now it was Fat Tulip and the local police inspector pelting each other with paint until they realised what they were doing. Even then, they did not seem to be all that repentant. Not that we saw any of this. It was all frantic narration with no notion of whether Fat Tulip is animal, vegetable or mineral.

So, what did we all learn, other than that animals talk? That the world might just be quite a nice place, that some creatures are basiclly kind to one another and that adults do some rather silly things. It’s not a bad summary of life, when you think of it.