A masterpiece for minors

Press, 28 July 1987, Page 19

A masterpiece for minors

Ruth Zanker

on television

One of the best programmes on television at the moment is hidden away at 3.15 on Sunday afternoons. For some months now our family has been forced to organise outings around it or tape it. The programme which manages to enchant parents and six and four-year-olds alike is Cosgrove Hall’s “Wind in the Willows.” We each draw something different from it but enjoy it together. This is television every bit as rewarding as reading aloud from a favourite book. For our elder son there is the vicarious thrill of sharing life and adventures with Toad. He is a loveable, “foolish creature,” much given to crazy enthusiasms and food, who gets into dreadful scrapes because of his pig-headedness and pride. He is always saved, in the nick of time, by his loyal friends, Ratty, Badger and Mole.

This has deep echoes for a six-year-old learning some of life’s more monumental lessons. Our four-year-old loves the way the snivelling sneaky weasels get their come-uppance. “No marks

for wrong answers,” says the chief bully, and so says our four-year-old one when wishing to drop a disarming bon-mot in a hot situation. A four-year-old’s dreams seem to be crowded with weasely creatures and ours finds it very satisfactory to know that, after all the scary bits, weasels always get trounced by Badger and Ratty. Grown-up reactions have moved from cautious approval to fanatical addiction as the months have passed.

The parent brought up on Kenneth Grahame’s book has had to concede that justice has been done to the precious memory. Clever scripting moves the story on to new yams without losing any detail in the characters. Indeed, it has been muttered that the definitive Toad has now been achieved. Sound adds a fascinating dimension to the book. True, Cockneys and Yorkshiremen might be a bit aggrieved to hear their accents used by the weasels (though what British director in his right mind would ever have let these artful dodgers speak Standard English?) But this piece of scripting is probably

true to the Edwardian class-framework of the original. Anyway, no-one’s going to complain about gems like the weasels’ Gilbert and Sullivan policemen’s chorus at Toad’s Christmas party. For the casual viewer there is joy in the models and settings alone. Anyone who has, at some stage of their lives, played with a doll’s house, will find Cosgrove Hall’s minature world exquisite. There are tiny willowpattern teapots, brass candlesticks and jam-jars; minute, crumbly cakes and berries that leave juice on lips; Toad’s scaled-down gentlemen’s

outfits and picnic hampers; Mole’s spectacles (which actually fog up); and Badger’s wornout slippers. It goes on and on. So we sit together enjoying the programme and each other’s company. And the repeated jokes continue long after we have switched off the set. Why, last week our elder son decided to give us each a code name: Toad, Ratty, Mole and Badger. He was uncanny in his selection. Incidentally, the lan- ■ guage used in the series is as rich as the original’s. We know, because we have sessions together reading from the original book as well. The activi-

ties complement each other, and I wonder if our four-year-old would enjoy such complex language without the visual stimulus of the television series. All of this rather flies in the face of the prophets-of-doom view held by i Marie Winn and others that television can never be more than the “plug-in-drug.”

It is much more constructive to argue for creative programming like this than to fight a Don Quixote’s campaign against the very medium of television itself.

After all, it’s in the way ,we use television that we can erode or develop our children’s imaginative world.