• In September I started an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. It is awesome being a student again, so interesting. I love talking about books, my classmates are fantastic, and I may have actually started writing a novel after a decade of talking about it. YOLO! Also it’s part-time over two years, so actually fits in with the rest of my life, which is nice.

• Then in November, my husband had a terrible bike accident. He was in intensive care for two weeks, and in hospital until mid-January. Our lives were completely upended. Everyone – family, friends, school, our employers, the NHS, the police – was absolutely incredible. We got so much support. He is making an impressive recovery, and is already back at home and work. But you can see why “writing my newsletter about children’s TV” fell through the cracks.

• At the same time as all of this I had an exciting mystery side project going on, and will reveal all this summer...

Anyway, now you’re up to speed and we should probably talk about children’s TV again. Obviously, the twins spent more time than they would usually do in front of screens, watching a lot of cat-centric content, so I thought I’d write about that today. They finally got into Grizzy and the Lemmings, but it made everyone hyper, so I was quite glad when that got abandoned in favour of cute kitties. Aaaaaw.

Sweet and Simple

Chi’s Sweet Home is a Japanese series about a cute, big-eyed grey tabby-and-white kitten called Chi. The latest of the three seasons, ‘Chi’s Sweet Adventure’, is on Netflix, which is where we discovered it. The two older series – the first one is from 2008, and it’s remarkable how basic the animation looks now – are on YouTube here and here (I’ve put the actual links here, because, depressingly, if you just search for it some weird fake AI version comes up as well, boo).

It will tell you a lot about how gentle, slow and short on dialogue this series is, that one series was only available in Japanese and my children didn’t mind at all for the first dozen or so episodes. I would occasionally read a subtitle when requested, but that was it. I’m sure that on some level it must be going in, so I can’t wait for a trip-of-a-lifetime holiday to Japan sometime in the 2030s when they can order me a mountain of sushi with flawless accents at some cool omakase joint.

Anyway, Chi is an adorable stray kitten who is adopted by the Yamada family. She falls in with a bunch of neighbourhood cats, led by Blackie, a large black Tom with a no-nonsense attitude. They go round looking for treats, locating sources of fish and having an annual “meeting” which is in fact a massive disco, complete with cat DJs. The meeting is odd, because the rest of the episodes are extremely domestic and the cats behave like cats, while this one represents a complete break with reality. But it is quite fun.

The other episodes are… calming. They are Zen. The stakes are phenomenally low. Am I going to use the word boring? Yeah, Chi is actually boring af, BUT, if your dad is in hospital and you don’t know if he’s coming home for Christmas (they did let him home for two nights over the festive season, which was wonderful) it is exactly what you need: a warm snuggly comfort blanket of not very much happening.

Chi eats some leaves of a houseplant, but is completely fine. The dad tries to put Chi in a funny costume to win an online competition, but the cat doesn’t like being dressed up. Chi chases some birds in the garden. That’s all there really is to it. I will warn you that the dad’s voice in the English dub is super annoying, real nails down a blackboard territory. But sometimes YouTube breaks and it gets stuck on Japanese ;) Gomenasai, kids.

By contrast, the third season on Netflix has had a massive glow-up. The animation is smoother. The plots are plottier. The cats are… implausibly all on this holiday too? They are a bunch of neighbourhood cats, how did they get on a plane to a remote island in the Pacific? Anyway, in this series, the Yamadas go to Okinawa for summer vacation where they explore some spooky haunted woods, befriend dragons and all sorts. I’d advise starting with the Netflix one because, even though it’s later on, I think it does a better job of establishing the characters than the actual opening season.

Loud and Complicated

Before everything happened, we went to see Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie at the cinema (at the Cineworld in the O2, in fact, using my student discount). It was genuinely good, IMHO. Gloria Estefan is Gabby’s grandma; the dollhouse gets lost in San Francisco; Kristen Wiig (who I spent the entire film thinking was Katy Perry, they look so similar) is the baddie; and there is a LOT of drama.

Whether you want to sit through this or not depends on how much time you have for Gabby’s Dollhouse in general: there is no radical departure from the formula. If you like the kawaii, rainbow, hyper-coloured sensory overload of the series, you’ll love the film. The songs, not gonna lie, are pretty good. Everything is tied up nicely, although (spoiler alert!) the Dollhouse becomes a hot-air balloon and floats off at the end.

I read some reviews while deciding whether to go, and all the critics were like “oh no i was crying at this poignant metaphor for the transition out of girlhood, Gabby has outgrown the dollhouse” and… I really didn’t get that vibe. Perhaps they’d done a creative writing degree and just wanted to see subtext in everything all the time? Mmmm… subtext. Guys: it was a movie! It had to have a bigger ending than an episode of the TV show!! Not everything is The Odyssey!! Yes, granted, they then cut to a scene where Gabby decides to pass the Dollhouse onto her younger sibling but… that’s quite normal. I really didn’t feel that much of an emotional punch, but possibly I was on a sugar high after too much pick’n’mix. Just enjoy it for what it is!

That’s All for Meow

Realistically, the big takeaway from this is: please can we have a quieter few months. If you all want to send thoughts/prayers/good vibes in the direction of whatever power you believe in, I’d be grateful for this. I will also try to update this more regularly: there are so many shows to write about. A propos of this: anybody who understands anything about what is happening in Lego: Dreamzzz please get in touch.

Finally, genuine question… would you also be interested in seeing some of my creative writing. Given that my day job is writing, this is writing and my MA is writing, there’s an obvious ✨end-to-end integrated synergy✨ for me to just put things up here. But I don’t know if that actually appeals to you guys… let me know!

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones

Shape Island is a beautiful – and I mean beautiful – animated series based on the books ‘Triangle,’ ‘Circle’, and ‘Square’ written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen. If you’re familiar with Klassen’s epic “Hat Trilogy”, you will know his style, with those little eyes that convey a world of emotions and a lot of twilit woods.

We borrowed ‘Triangle’ from the library years ago, and “go away snakes, leave my door” was a catchphrase for a while round these parts. I found it deeply engaging – something about the desolate landscape of the island resonated with me. Possibly it looked like my scalp, as my hair slowly grew back having fallen out post-partum.

Shape Island expands the world from three short but charming books to tell the stories of Circle, Square and Triangle, who live on a tropical island with just plants and animals for company. According to the official blurb, “Serious Square, intrepid Circle and tricky Triangle embark on silly adventures as they dig up some fun, search for answers and build on their friendships, all while learning how to navigate each other’s differences,” but that’s like saying “Casablanca is a heart-warming romcom where a cynical barman learns to love again!” In other words, we are going on a JOURNEY, so BUCKLE UP BESTIE.

I was having an emotion, and I hate that

My tolerance for cringe is low (I can’t watch The Office) and the first two episodes of Shape Island are the toughest half hour of TV I’ve seen in a long time. In ‘Square’s very kind gesture,’ Square’s plan to share his bananas goes hideously wrong, while ‘Eclipse’ sees Square and Triangle try to keep a secret from Circle. If you find misunderstandings, or adhering to social codes in any way difficult, you will go on an odyssey of painful empathy watching this. I found myself shouting at the screen “EAT YOUR BANANA SQUARE! PUT YOURSELF FIRST!”.

At the end I said to the girls “well that was a bit much, wasn’t it? Shall we try something else” and they said “no! What happens next?!” so on we went. And after that… they’re much less stressful. Much more in the normal realm of “we feel big feelings, talking always helps” zone of normal children’s TV. The shapes have picnics, go on adventures…. it’s fine. In fact it’s better than fine: the sets are wonderful, the pacing is great, and it is so gentle. Like Tik Tak, it’s a really refreshing antidote to loud, chaotic cartoons.

Until, that is, the last episode – ‘The Winter Blues’ – in which mum and dad Circle and Triangle invent “Yeti Night” to cheer up Square, who doesn’t enjoy the cold. Circle rumbles them, and realises Father Christmas the Yeti isn’t real, before a series of plot twists ensue which will basically drag your heart out and leave it bleeding on the floor. About half way through I stopped looking at the screen and started looking at the girls to see if there was a flicker of recognition, but luckily it flew straight over their heads… I think. Since writing this, questions have been asked about the tooth fairy, with one twin proposing “motion activated cameras” to capture her in the act of fairying. Hmmmmm.

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans.

I always wonder about these kind of series: who is it for? Do children actually enjoy seeing all these difficult feelings, emotions and actions portrayed on screen? I guess the theory is it helps them navigate things like sharing, rules, FOMO and being kind by portraying the reality: it doesn’t always feel nice but it’s the right thing to do.

But then maybe it’s too honest, and most programmes only show the upside because it’s easier to skip to the nice feeling of having done the right thing. Is it really for adults, so we can smile wryly and know that we actually *don’t* have to share our bananas if we don’t want to….? I don’t know. This kind of programme simply didn’t exist in the 80s.

I wonder what this generation’s therapy bills will look like? Nonexistent because we acknowledged all their feelings as valid? Or immense because they had to watch poor, poor Square have his banana given away to someone who doesn’t even like them that much?

As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure

What did I think of Murderbot? It was… fine. I enjoyed it.

Alexander Skarsgard looked the part. But the pacing was off: a show for grown-ups can’t be 20 minutes long. Come on. People are just settling into the plot and BOOM, credits. Nope. So overall, it was nicely acted, different enough to the books to be interesting, and quite plotty, but I feel like it could have been funnier and sassier.

(TOM WRITES WITH A COUNTERPOINT: I am not going to correct your opinion here but... isn’t this the traditional length of (American) comedies? Frankly I support this, funny things should get in and get out quickly. I watched an episode of Ted Lasso on Apple and somewhere around the forty minute mark I got incredibly twitchy and started asking “christ is this still on?”)

Having got Pete to fork out for the subscription, we come on to the real reason I wanted it: Mark Ronson’s Watch the Sound. This is a few years old, but AMAZING. Now let me be honest: Mark Ronson could produce the sound of foxes squabbling in a wheelie bin and I’d put it on constant repeat. Mark Ronson could narrate a shopping list, and I’d listen to it. Mark Ronson and his beautiful nose… you get the picture.

While he is a total nepo baby, he is very honest about it, casually recalling the famous guests at his parents’ parties. And he has, IMHO, produced most of the best records of this century so far. So when Apple TV+ handed him (one presumes) infinite money, he could call EVERYONE to be on his programme. Paul McCartney, Charli XCX, Questlove, The Beastie Boys, T-Pain… everyone. The travel budget? Here’s Mark looking for rare vinyl to sample in Tokyo, the only place on earth with record shops. Oh, now he’s in a disused diesel storage facility in Scottish Highlands making recordings with the world’s longest reverb. A quick jaunt to the secret underground echo chambers of LA? Why not.

In the series Mark goes and asks experts about everything from sampling to synthesisters. He covers everything from big-picture “woo science” moments (did you know autotune was invented by oceanographers to improve the way echo mapping works?) to rock’n’roll hall of fame nerdery (when Dave Grohl didn’t want to use a click track for the drumming on ‘heart shaped box’ they flashed a giant strobe light in his eyes to make him keep time). It is well worth a watch.

Time to Unwind with some Sanctuary Moon

Apple TV+ has a ton of huge-name marquee TV shows: Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, Severance, etc. etc., but I have failed to watch any of them, so I will leave you to form your own opinions. Ultimately, I cannot forgive them for getting Owen Wilson (one of my favourite actors of all time) and casting him in Stick, a show about golf (possibly the least interesting thing on Earth). Why, Apple, why??? I never liked their phones anyway. Please excuse me while I take some time to deal with the big feelings I’m currently experiencing. URGH.

When I was small the summer holidays felt like six weeks of watching the clouds float through the sky while carefully placing blades of grass on the surface tension of the paddling pool water, but things seem to move at a faster pace now. Or do they, for children? I hope you are all finding a bit of peace and sanity in the midst of the craziness.

Part of my pre-holiday rush was sorting loads of health stuff (boring, but improving) in the course of which a kindly NHS physio sent me this paper about shoulder pain which has absolutely blown my mind. Did you know they did *pretend surgery* on people’s shoulders to see if the placebo effect happened? (It did.) It is such an interesting, accessible, read, about how little we actually know about shoulders (and by extension the whole human body). It is also the text that has finally convinced me to ✨do my stretches✨ — so a great read for anyone who has aching shoulders.

After that massive tangent let’s talk about kids’ TV. It’s the summer holidays, is everyone going to get slightly more screen time than they usually have? Realistically, yes. So let’s broaden our horizons and go back to the past.

Noughties Revival

You can’t move for Y2K revival, from chain belts and Juicy Couture to actual Girls Aloud playing at the O2. So I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon (bring back Urban Decay gunmetal nail polish) and talk about a children’s TV classic from this era: Numberjacks. Obviously, I wasn’t watching kids TV in the noughties. I was busy straightening my hair and making terrible life decisions, BUT my niece was, and this was her favourite show. (Numberblocks is unrelated to Numberjacks, a thing that deeply confused Editor Tom for a while during the preparation of this newsletter.)

Numberjacks recounts the adventures of a bunch of anthropomorphic blob shaped numbers who live inside the couch of a London family: this bit is actually genius, because what child doesn’t wonder if things live inside speakers or TVs, or under their beds and sofas? The Numberjacks go about their everyday lives inside their sofa until a call comes in from an “Agent”, one of a squad of children who report problems that need solving (OK, getting weirder). One or two of the Numberjacks fly out on location to foil the plans of the “Meanies” (this is just strange now).

I started watching it with the twins last summer – there’s loads of episodes on Youtube – and they love it. I can say it is without a doubt the best secret sofa-inside computer-animated number superhero show I’ve ever seen.

The animation is absolutely of its time – you can hear the computer processors whirring in order to make a pool-noodleesque numeral pogo slowly around the screen. Remember that weird noughties satin-texture fabric they made handbags and jackets out of? I bet the Numberjacks all feel like that to touch. However, children seem unbothered by this; it may as well have been made with Disney live action reboot levels of CGI.

Nice one, Three-zer

I feel like comparing watching children’s TV to being on drugs is lazy: it’s been done a thousand times, blah blah, The Magic Roundabout, students watching Teletubbies…. I don’t exactly live in fear of cliché, and even I think it’s a step too far.

However, I defy you to look at “The Numbertaker” – the primary Meanie – and think of anything other than a Jeremy Deller site-specific installation where he’s talking about getting some proper Mitsubishis off a geezer in a layby off the A3. He has his own theme song! He has a “number sucker-upper”! He looks like he played the Pyramid Stage in ‘97! Come on, the guys who wrote this had to have had access to the “good stuff” and you can’t convince me otherwise.

(Also, because I love a rabbit hole, turns out the actor who played the Numbertaker went on to be a White Walker in Game of Thrones and a bunch of Doctor Who baddies… transferable skills.)

The other Meanies are just as strange. Spooky Spoon is a floating purple spoon with a face, a sort of narcissistic Hyacinth Bucket who mixes up everyday objects with chaotic results. Ms. Spoon is what we now call “a messy bitch who lives for drama” and it occurs to me that a lot of Gen Z influencers were probably watching Numberjacks as children. Spooky Spoon would definitely have a TikTok channel where she talks a lot about other people’s “toxic personality traits” and gaslights her followers into thinking they need to buy her wellness products. Look at this magnificent fan edit and ask yourself: did Spooky Spoon create a generation of perfectly-contoured Instagram scammers? I’m just thinking out loud.

There’s also Problem Blob, a sort of sentient bogey with an Alien-style eyeball on a stalk who slobbers green slime over everything. It is a long time since I read Freud’s Totem and Taboo but whoever decided that parents of toddlers needed more bodily fluids, thanks to an expectorating snot villain, should do jail time. Still, he amuses the children and that’s what counts, right?

But what *is* counting?

Numberjacks is absolute bants: things disappear, the kids tell the squidgy numbers, they go out of the sofa arm where they live into the real world and fix the problem with shonky green screen special effects. Is it entertainment? Yes, absolutely. Is it teaching anyone maths…. Errrrrr…. To channel Spooky Spoon, does anyone even care? NO!

The official Numberjacks website says the show is about “excitement, fun and learning, thinking skills, problem solving and maths,” and I’d argue that reflects their priorities while making it. It’s probably quite good for teaching small children number recognition, and maybe some addition. There’s an episode about zero which is quite handy given it’s more of a mathematical concept than a thing that really exists. But at the end of the day, maths learning is the poor relation of plot, and by plot I mean the numbers faffing around arguing about who gets to go out on a mission. Have a boss! Implement some structures! I’m amazed they manage anything! Chain of command, people.

If you actually want your children to keep up with maths in summer holidays, then Numberblocks is on iPlayer. But if you are running out of ideas in the final weeks and want to spend a rainy afternoon thinking WTAF, then the Numberjacks summer special (a sort of extended universe special featuring ALL the baddies) is here. And if you’re on a long journey, I wrote this guide to things you can watch with sound down here.

This has led to less of my beloved linear TV, and more streaming and YouTube. YouTube obviously has its ups and downs, but there’s some stuff on there which is absolutely delightful, so let’s talk about a couple of things we’ve ended up watching.

You, and Me, and the Kidtime Family

Kidtime Storytime is a YouTube channel with a million subscribers run by “Storyteller” and her sidekick, “off-screen technical genius.” She reads books out loud. That’s it. However, unlike the calm, gentle pacing of the Cbeebies bedtime story, which we have already discussed at length, these stories are manic. Storyteller is “assisted” by an array of puppets who interrupt, talk back, and constantly distract her. The energy is cranked up to maximum. Even her nails are loud, adorned with day-glo manicures that match the book’s theme. It is a lot. But the twins (OK, one twin in particular) love it.

There are many impressive things about Kidtime Storytime. For a start, the sheer number of books she’s read: there’s more than a thousand videos on there. Next, the way they’re categorised, so you can go find them by subject (think “school life” or “monsters”) if you want a particular type of book. She takes particular delight in the “don’t do X to Y” format, which I personally don’t enjoy reading, so it’s great to outsource that task. Finally… the puppets.

Look, I absolutely love puppets. I was on the Big Breakfast once as a teenager, and seeing Zig and Zag in person was a highlight. Mongrels is still the best thing that’s ever been on BBC3. We went to the panto in Bromley a couple of years ago and Baron Hardup’s ventriloquist act had everyone in stitches. The highlight of Croydon Harvest Festival? Plucky, the giant chicken, and the fox on a lime scooter. Puppets are cheeky, puppets are subversive, it’s all pretty Freudian on some level, probably, but they crack me up. I wrote last time about how I hate Messy from Okido, but if he were a puppet, I’d love him.

Storyteller’s use of puppets is both unconventional and effective. I don’t think she’d be offended if I said she’s not much of an actual puppeteer – they are basically toys she waves around under a rostrum camera, rather than some Jim Henson-esque articulated construction. But she is good at doing silly voices, and using the toys to ask questions, reflect on the books, and have some emotionally mature conversations about feelings. Most importantly, they make my children cackle with glee. Many an awkward moment has been defused round here by saying “BAT BURRITO” in a gravelly voice. So that’s great.

Scrub that Idea

Sometimes, I am too slow with the remote, and the algorithm takes over. That’s how we ended up watching Scribble Scrubbies, a series of short animations designed to promote Crayola’s toy line of the same name. We’ve talked about toy tie-in cartoons before, and how awful they are, but Scribble Scrubbies is weirdly fascinating. I’ve watched a good hour of it (that’s a lot, given the episodes are 4 minutes each) and I still can’t decide whether it's incoherent trash, or a work of misunderstood genius created by rejects from the SNL writers’ room.

A Scribble Scrubbie, I now know, is a small white plastic toy that you can endlessly re-colour in with felt tips, before washing it off in a cute little plastic bath. The Scrubbie is, if you will, a tabula rasa upon which the child’s will can be endlessly exercised. The writers take full advantage of this, and whenever anything resembling a plot point approaches, a real, live-action child simply lifts them out of the cartoon, scribbles them into the appropriate outfit, then puts them back in to continue the narrative. The stories, naturally, are set in a modern-day version of the classic Hollywood studio era, complete with crazy bosses, forgotten backlots and costume departments.

There are Easter Eggs for grown-ups (get to 7.40 and tell me that’s not a Scribble Scrubbie dressed up as Artpop-era Lady Gaga). There is constant breaking of the fourth wall. The girls like it, but… well, they also like VIP Pets. I don’t even know if you can buy the toys in this country.

A Treasure Trove of Classics

But how did we end up on YouTube in the first place, you ask? Because there’s loads of old children’s TV on there. We were looking for Numberjacks, which I’ll talk about another time, but as an archive it’s unbeatable. I need a project over the summer holidays, so tell me about your 80s/90s/00s favourites below and we can dig them out and have a look.

Just make sure you steer them away from unboxing videos: there is only one that’s worth watching, it’s one minute and forty seconds long, and it’s here. And if you do see something dodgy, report it.

BAT BURRITO!!!

*Full disclosure, I have done work for Google, which owns YouTube. Look at all the people I’ve done work for, in fact, why not hire me? Ideally in September ;)

Herne Bay was great. Less bougie than Whitstable, less arcadey than Margate and very nicely kept, it had everything you could want from the English seaside. Paddling, fish and chips, pier, hook-a-duck, eerie decaying WWII forts on the horizon – it really had the lot. Except a sandy beach, but the pebbles are much easier to walk on than Brighton, so I’ll forgive the lack of sand. It also had the Telly-go-round, a magnificently bonkers piece of seaside entertainment.

The Telly-Go-Round was placed on Herne Bay seafront by the Rotary Club in 1967 and returns every summer season. You can read more here, but basically, you slot in a coin and get a Wheel-Of-Fortune style reveal of… a children’s TV character! If you land on “jackpot,” Thomas the Tank Engine comes out for a victory lap and ALL the characters show up. Fine, it is showing its age a bit, with the Tweenies and The Magic Roundabout, but it’s fundamentally brilliant, because any coin makes it work, and it’s all for charity. Aaaaw.

Another factor in my prolonged absences is that I’ve done that thing where you can get one two items/projects/kids TV shows behind, but now I’m so far back, I don’t know where to start. But you have to start somewhere, so, let’s begin with popular science for little people.

Storybots, Living Inside Computer Parts

Storybots is an American show, on Netflix, in which puppets answer various kids’ questions. Think “Where Do French Fries Come From?” or “What Is Electricity?” A team of puppets, called Beep, Boop, Bing, Bang and Bo, go off on various adventures to find out, in surprisingly impressive detail. When they started with “Why is the sky blue?” I raised an eyebrow, but after twenty minutes they’d done a very solid explanation of Rayleigh scattering.

The girls looked at me at the end and said “is it true?” and I realised just how much we live in an age of disinformation. In writing this, I couldn’t remember the name for the blue light scattering off the tiny particles and, while searching it, learned that apparently some people think the sky is blue because it reflects the sea? Crikey.

Storybots, Helping Kids Get Super Smart

The writers of Storybots deserve a medal for the thoroughness of their explanations and attention to detail. Hearing? There’s a scene where the characters go across the three tiny bones in the inner ear; come GCSE biology, those diagrams are going to be a doddle. “Where does rain come from?” Buckle up, we are going to do the whole water cycle in 20 minutes. Look at this 90-second song about Marconi and radio, in which they not only put an antenna in the UK, they put it in Essex because the Marconi factory was in Chelmsford. Come on, that’s an incredible grasp of British geography for an American show. They must be getting everything else right. Also, shout out for my mates’ favourite craft beer and heavy metal venue, which is named in honour of Essex’s illustrious role in radio history.

Also, because it’s made by Netflix, Storybots is contractually obliged to have a firmament of A-list stars appear to keep the grown-ups interested. There’s John Legend as the King of music, Edward Norton as an electrical appliance salesman, and Snoop Dogg as a computer operating system. It is nothing if not entertaining.

This brings me on to my only criticism, which is that it can be a bit too fast and loud. Yes, children’s brains are plastic and absorb information very fast, but sometimes it’s like watching a wholesome, educational, child-centred Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The whole of Marconi in less than two minutes? Guys, it took half an hour in A-level physics! So for all that it’s delightful to watch as an adult, I wonder how much of the information is going in, and how much it’s just bright colours and catchy songs. They also do a couple of “fascinating fact” type inserts about something unrelated every episode and I’m like, why, you are cramming so much in already, this is not going to help! Apparently, the show is for 1-8 year olds, but I honestly cannot imagine a toddler getting much out of it.

If you Want to Know, Go to Okido

If you want a more gently-paced education explainer type show, Messy Goes to OKIDO is on iPlayer. Dealing with the same classic theme - little robots go inside big machines and explain things to kids, a sock-eating monster called Messy joins two human children, Zoe and Felix, and science robot trio Zim, Zam and Zoom.

It packs less into an episode than Storybots, which I think makes everything easier to understand (the one about circuits is excellent, with a real “Tron” aesthetic), and sticks to the theme throughout. So if you want a rock-solid understanding of magnets, gravity or whatever, this is the place to go, especially with slightly younger kids.

The only downside is the character of Messy himself. Per Wikipedia, “Whilst Messy means well his excitement can often land him in trouble, he can't control his urge to push buttons,” and my God does he push my buttons. He’s a little pain in the arse and I cannot get on board with having an impulsive, stuff-breaking, interrupting hero aimed at an age group who are trying to gain mastery over these very urges. It’s setting them up to pass their SATs, but fail the marshmallow test. Also, he sounds like a tiny blue Gap Yah student trashing things in Koh Samui. That’s my problem, though. Sorry Adam Buxton, if you’re reading.

Don’t Overdo It

I actually love these kind of shows (we should talk about Get Set Galactic and Maddie Moate another time, as well). But there is probably a limit to how much knowledge you should try and cram into your children anyway. They literally teach this stuff in schools, and it is quite nice to just chill out at home.

Let’s take a moment to think about Victorian philosopher, economist and all-round smart guy John Stuart Mill. Mill was hothoused by his parents; he was taught ancient Greek from three, had read the whole of Herodotus and a fair bit of Xenophon by the age of eight, and went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors by the age of ten. Did it make him happy? No: he basically had a mental breakdown at 20. Granted, he then invented modern liberalism, but he had to get really into poetry first.

All of this is to say that parenting is the hardest job in the world, but you’re doing great!! I wish someone would do us a three-minute catchy pop song to explain how to get it right ;)

This time we are doing another subscriber request – this time for my friend and former colleague, John Miller, who has requested American children’s TV classic Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Who, you may ask, is Miller? He was my colleague back in the day in the Wall Street Journal’s Brussels bureau; I started writing an anecdote about his souvenir bright pink 2010 FIFA World Cup vuvuzela, before deciding it was more of a “you had to be there” story. He’s a very funny, very clever Belgo-American, who now lives in Pittsburgh, where Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood was recorded.

A Publishing Home Run

I’ve waited til now to watch his choice of programme because… his book is out! It’s called The Last Manager and is a biography of sweary, emotional, alcoholic baseball manager Earl Weaver. It is no exaggeration to say that every single thing I know about baseball, I know because John told me. And honestly, he is such a good and consummate storyteller, I really enjoyed listening to the adventures of the Brussels Kangaroos.

Guys, I know it is only March, but if you have a father/son/brother or any other person you love but is very difficult to buy presents for in your life, you could get them Tom’s book and John’s book and even if they’re not particularly into either the apocalypse or baseball per se they will probably love them. They are just that good at writing. Make a little mental note and thank me later this year. OK, here endeth the annoying podcast advert voice. Let’s talk about children’s TV.

Daniel Tiger’s Origin Story

Mr. Rogers is an institution of American broadcasting, so this is a bit like being asked to review Blue Peter; I’m going to apologise now if I trample on anyone’s precious childhood memories. First broadcast in 1968, the show ran for 33 years; you can find various bits on YouTube, including on the PBS Kids channel. However, it turns out many of you will be more familiar with the show than you realise… because it is the Cheers to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood’s Frasier.

Daniel Tiger, which I’m sure you’ve all seen on CBeebies or YouTube, is based on a shy puppet who lives in a clock in the original series. Just like DTN, Mr Rogers loves to talk about feelings, sharing, taking turns, and the ”trolley” (it’s a tram, not a shopping trolley – a “trolley problem” trolley. Trolley trolley trolley. It’s like the vuvuzela all over again). Broadly, Mr. Rogers explores a lot of the same territory as DTN, but with a live action narrator and some delightful cutaway sequences.

The first thing that struck me about Mr Rogers is how very calm it is. A lot of my best friends are American; I’ve been to the USA several times, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. But I wouldn’t describe either my friends, or their country, as particularly chilled.

And yet, somehow our friends from across the pond have created the most sedate children’s show of all time. Listen to this guy’s voice! It’s so relaxing! The pacing, so very gentle. He’s got an internal jazz piano monologue! How (and this comes from a place of love) did one of the noisiest countries on earth produce this oasis of calm? I don’t know, but I’m here for it.

What I’m not here for is the NTSC picture quality, but children don’t seem to notice/care about picture quality, you have to teach them this by relentlessly passing your values on to the next generation. (The other day one of the twins pointed out a pharmacy sign that was in the wrong aspect ratio, which made me one very proud mummy. We’re going to do audio quality next 😜)

A Blueprint for Children’s TV

It’s quite startling how many classic children’s TV elements are here. It’s like looking at the Norman Rockwell original of the CBeebies house. There’s instructional videos where we learn a new skill, such as hula hooping. And there’s finding out how things are made in factories – endlessly fascinating, and I’d rather listen to Mr Rogers narrate this than Maddie Moate (sorry Maddie). You can see them making a record (this machine must have cost an insane amount of money back in the day), or have a tour of the macaroni factory.

The whole thing is utterly delightful, and very absorbing. I suspect the pace is just too slow for today’s world, but the spirit of this program lives on pretty much everywhere across children’s TV. I was going to try and get through this whole thing without talking about current events in America, but it’s impossible not to watch this sweet, gentle program and then turn on the news and recoil in shock. I hope everyone finds their inner Mr Rogers and ends up being a bit kinder to each other! In the meantime, there’s always Daniel Tiger.

***

You know it when you see it. Phoebe from friends. Crochet granny squares. New Girl. Cocktail bars called “Professor Snaffleburger’s Palace of Alchemical Tinctures.” Snag Tights. Jarvis Cocker’s monologue three minutes into this. Berets. Wearing indie nail polish. It’s a little bit kooky, a little bit jazzy, a whole lot of… quirky.

Clearly, I love quirky things. Why else would I have spent too much time listening to that Pulp track, on vinyl, while painting my nails midnight blue as a teenager? Why will I now willingly pay the best part of twenty English pounds for a hibiscus-infused tequila and cucumber concoction with dry ice poured over it? I can’t help it, I just am this way. But the good news is, people like me are clearly well-represented in the world of children’s TV, because it is quirky AF. Today I’ll talk about two shows which fly the (vintage raspberry corduroy) quirk flag high: Circle Square and Sarah & Duck.

Black Country TV Gold

Circle Square should be much more famous than it is. But sadly, it is on the My5 streaming service, a place known only to true crime enthusiasts and bleary-eyed parents of toddlers who have watched every Paw Patrol episode on Netflix and know a few recent episodes lurk there, ready to provide a new, out-of-sequence dose of Adventure Bay action. But it is worth grappling with the worst interface this side of ITVX to enjoy the hidden gem that is Circle Square.

Things get off to a great start with the theme tune, which sounds like one of the bands I and my blue-painted nails would see playing in York Fibbers circa 1999. It has a “recaps entire premise in the opening credits” sequence, which I am always fond of. And, as someone who loves accents, it finally gives the Brummies some love. If you think of how often you hear a Black Country twang on kids TV, compared to other British accents… There’s some serious under-representation of the West Midlands, and CS is righting that wrong.

(General parenting note: my sister lives in Birmingham and the big science museum there, Think Tank, has the most amazing soft play/interactive bit up the top, called Mini Brum. The building site climbing frame is particularly good. It’s not cheap, but absolutely worth the money if you have any reason to be in the area with small children who need amusing.)

Somebody needs my help today, but who?

The accent belongs to Vanessa the dragon, a purple sphere with two dainty little twig-like wings who is always ready to help her neighbours on Green Island. These neighbours are (in ascending order of quirkiness) a human family, a dog, a bear, owls, a yeti, a family of wizards, some talking instruments, and two pine trees.

According to this interview with the show's creators, the owls were originally meant to be noses, but “we just weren’t sure how many stories we could get out of some walking talking noses. They were a step too far! And before the instruments, we had a BLT sandwich and ping pong ball. Maybe they’re living on another island somewhere now. Ha ha!” I mean just give these guys the Quirk Crown. They’ve won! Everyone else can go home (via Professor Snaffleburger’s, obvs).

Circle Square is drawn in a sort of bulbous, stick-limbed way which doesn’t look like anything else on children’s TV – more like the sort of pictures you’d expect on the T-shirt of tattoo artist who also DJs at a funk night, but also genuinely cute and appealing. Above all, the stories are actually really good. The episode ‘Taking A Fence’ is one of the best explainers I’ve seen of “don’t just do what your big siblings/cousins/whoever” does, with a nice rebuttal of NIMBYism and some good messages about sharing. ‘Babysitter’ is just very, very funny about the mechanics of bedtime. Just watch it, it’s delightful.

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Obviously, there is a mountain of much-heralded marquee Christmas programming coming your way, but I think they show that to actual influencers in July, so don’t look at me. There’s a new Wallace and Gromit – “Vengeance Most Fowl” – which is probably excellent, but in this age of streaming and catch-up, Tom and I are going to suggest some classics (some lost, some less lost) you can enjoy over the next two weeks, along with how suitable they are for watching with kids present.. For ease of reading, I’m in normal text, Tom’s in block quotes. Also, his ones are funnier.

A Word About Die Hard

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? The question gets re-litigated on social media every year and honestly at this point it’s got dull. Yes; no; it all depends what you mean by “Christmas movie”. A movie set at Christmas? A movie that’s thematically about Christmas? Is Christmas integral to the plot, or does it just contribute vibes? What about a movie that just feels Christmassy because that’s when you end up watching it?

It’s weird that we keep debating this about Die Hard specifically. I get that there’s a level of “OMG it’s an ACTION MOVIE but it’s set at CHRISTMAS! How crazy is that?!?”, but come on people: Lethal Weapon came out the year before Die Hard, and that’s also an action movie set at Christmas. (Naturally – it was written by Shane Black, a man with an almost superhuman dedication to setting action movies at Christmas.)

Perhaps it’s because it lies at the mid point of Christmasism: Christmas is a plot point (that’s why McClane is going to his ex-wife’s work party, which is a bit weird tbh) but not an essential one, and the Christmassy setting is more than background set-dressing but isn’t thematically central.

I recently watched Die Hard for the first time (yes, I’m in my 40s, no, I’ve never seen Terminator either) and it is good, but not that Christmassy? Also I couldn’t really get past Alan Rickman’s hair. Sorry.

Bernard and the Genie

I’m not one for hyperbole, but Bernard and the Genie is the greatest Christmas film of all time. Written by a post-Blackadder, pre-Four Weddings Richard Curtis, Alan Cumming is a nerdy antiques dealer, Rowan Atkinson his avaricious boss, and Lenny Henry plays the Genie who comes out of the lamp, and turns out to have witnessed many of Jesus’ miracles first-hand.

I’ve never understood why it isn’t more famous. It’s very funny, genuinely heartwarming and festive AF. It’s an hour and a bit, the perfect length to watch while digesting too much cheese. The jokes are very funny. The cameos are distilled essence of 1991. It’s delightful.

Readers: do not show B&TG to tiny children, it’s got rude words, some proper peril, and an actual bittersweet ending. I watched it when I was 10, loved it, and on re-watching it as adult, all the age-inappropriate jokes went straight over my head at the time. You can watch a terrible quality recording here but if any streaming executives are reading this, buy the rights and give it a push! It’s millennial nostalgia gold.

Christmas Density: 10/10

Suitability for children: Features Rowan Atkinson delivers a scathing “Bugger ye off” to AC and jokes along the lines of Lenny Henry asking “What colour is this guy?” when he hears Barry White for the first time. If you’re OK explaining that kind of thing, crack on.

A Christmas Prince

Netflix has gone all in on the NCU: the Netflix Christmas Universe, a vast splurge of tenuously interlinked low-budget Christmas rom-coms. The one that kicked it off remains among the best, though: the adorably goofy tale of the world’s worst, least ethical journalist falling for the prince of an inexplicable mitteleuropean microstate and teaming up with him to prevent the baffling constitutional shenanigans of his jealous cousin, Poundshop Loki. You should, however, avoid The Knight Before Christmas, which completely blows its Les Visiteurs-riff plot of a medieval knight being thrown forward in time and teaching a modern lady about Chivalry and stuff. He doesn’t even murder anybody! Rubbish.

Christmas Density: 10/10

Suitability for children: High, although it may prompt them to ask questions about constitutional structures that are hard to answer.

Mog’s Christmas

Fine, this only came out last year - it was Channel 4’s big Christmas day special (watch here). It’s a lovely rendering of Judith Kerr’s seasonal Mog story. The reason I’m including it is the song in the middle, which made me put down my glass of port and go “that’s Sophie Ellis-Bextor” with a mouth full of walnuts (my mouth, not hers, obvs: she was singing). Anyway, I’ve got a lot of time for Ellis-Bextor, she provided the vocals for the greatest dance track ever, seems like a genuinely sound person and I’ll even forgive her for being a nepo baby because her mum was my favourite Blue Peter presenter. On top of this, the song is by David Arnold, who wrote the best Bond theme that never was, kd lang’s Surrender, which they swapped out for Sheryl Crow’s Tomorrow Never Dies, for homophobia reasons known only to MGM. 1997… it feels like last century.

Christmas Density: 10/10

Suitability for children: TBH it would be weird if you had children in the house and watched this without them, it’s Mog.

Millions

One of the great overlooked Christmas films of the last few decades, probably because the distributors decided to release it in May opposite a Star War. Also, in fairness, before the Olympics elevated Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce to national treasurehood, it may have been a tough sell: guys, it’s a heartwarming family film from the director of 28 Days Later and the writer of Welcome to Sarajevo. But it’s a true delight, and features one of the most genuinely adorable young kid performances in recent times from Alex Etel, as a kid obsessed with the saints who is suddenly faced with a moral dilemma when a bag of money falls out of the sky. One aspect that hasn’t aged well, in fairness, and may prove traumatic to some: the very fun plot point is that they only have twelve days left to spend the money before… Britain joins the Euro. Oh.

Christmas Density: 8/10

Suitability for children: Fair to good. Mild but evocative peril, some light grief, plus at one point Saint Clare of Assisi is depicted smoking a funny-shaped cigarette.

The World Is Not Enough

I started talking about James Bond, so now I sound like Alan Partridge, so I’m just going to lean into that. TWINE is not the best Bond film: that’s clearly Goldeneye. But it is… Christmassy? It’s got Lara Croft Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones, an American nuclear physicist who enables some truly terrible, Roger Moore-level puns. There’s Robbie Coltrane doing a Russian accent and an action sequence in a caviar factory. Just stick a bauble on it and admit it: it’s the Christmas Bond.

Christmas Density: 6/10

Suitability for children: It’s a Bond film. You’re a parent, you decide.

Iron Man 3

As noted, Shane Black does love a Christmassy action film (see also: The Long Kiss Goodnight and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (what a film!!! I had forgotten all about this, watch it now if you haven’t, says Frances) to the point that when it emerged that he was also making Iron Man 3 a Christmas film many feared he’d slid into self-parody. But it honestly kind of works! Tony Stark does in fact learn a valuable lesson about the true meaning of Christmas, in between trying to make Guy Pearce explode. Also features one of my favourite needle drops in film history right at the beginning.

Christmas Density: 6/10

Suitability for children: I mean it’s PG-13, bit darker than the other Iron Mens, but older kids should be fine.

This Christmas

The twins and I were waiting for a train at Forest Hill station when a very well-spoken lady recommended this “because it has twins in.” There is nothing like having twins to make you realise what a lazy standby plot staple they’ve been for the last 3,000 years, BUT ALSO, make you realise why they are lazy standby plot staple. The same things happen and they react totally differently! They are a little daily lesson in the power of free will! Two people, same circumstances, different destinies (actually we all just got on the train shortly after).

Anyway this year’s Netflix big family Xmas special is set on the Suffolk Coast, has twins in it, a school play, overworked NHS nurses… the lot. It also has just the right amount of peril, i.e., everyone was invested but didn’t run out of the room shouting “too scary.” Pete said the animation was a bit uncanny valley, but he’s quite a harsh critic. Overall, it’s extremely festive, and did make me well up a bit at the end. And then the credits rolled. Richard Curtis. Again. The man’s a Christmas machine.

Christmas Density: 10/10, Curtis klaxon

Suitability for children: Yes, this peril is truly moderate.

The Green Knight

We’re definitely now entering “are you sure this is a Christmas movie” territory, to which I would respond: yes. No, most of David Lowery’s weirdo Arthurian fantasy does not take place at Christmas, but it’s absolutely central that it begins and ends at Christmas. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that: Dev Patel. Far be it from this newsletter to descend into the seedy depths of lust, but I will merely note that the Green Knight is a very relatable character, because Dev Patel could absolutely cut my head off and I’d still try to meet up with him a year later.

Christmas Density: 4/10

Suitability for children: Not really. Violence, lewdness, overwhelming spookiness and there’s the risk that they’ll get really into chivalric poetry.

Mimi and the Mountain Dragon

Absolutely a Christmas movie, this is from the same BBC stable as the very slow Julia Donaldson adaptations we discussed last time. Mimi is a very shy girl, her family are loud chatterboxes, and a cute baby dragon has gone missing at Christmas. We watched this about 8000 times at Christmas when they were two, and one twin was further along with talking than the other; they loved it. It was also the year of the pandemic, and I think we could all identify with being stuck in a remote mountain village. An excellent 20 minutes of TV while you sneak off to wrap a present/stuff Lindor balls in your face before returning to the chaos.

Christmas Density: 6/10, no Santa, actually feels more “winter in general”

Suitability for children: Yes, especially toddlers, because there’s minimal plot/dialogue

In Bruges

Definitely not one to watch with the kids, this, given the astonishing profanity count and multiple violent deaths. But it is pretty great. Your tolerance for Martin McDonagh’s schtick may vary, but it’s hard to deny that his work levels up hard when he’s got Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson to play with. The Christmas setting is mostly dissonant background detail, but it does mean that they can set-dress Bruges to look even more “like a fairytale” than it normally does, and boy does that pay off. Fun fact: Bruges is tiny, so if you go there you will probably visit every location in this film largely by accident.

Christmas Density: 2/10

Suitability for children: Absolutely not.

Merry Christmas everyone! See you next year!!!

When I started this newsletter in spring, I thought I’d get bored and give up after six weeks, but we have made it to Christmas, so two things are happening to celebrate. Firstly, editor Tom and I will write a festive guide to Christmas classics for children and adults next week; if you have any suggestions do message us or share them below and we’ll get watching.

And secondly, I have turned on a special Christmas offer: all subscriptions are half price until December 31st. I will probably do more paid content next year so if you pony up now a) you can save money and b) present it to someone with small children as a little Xmas present. Go on, you know you want to: here is the link.

Ahead of our thoughts on festive viewing more generally, I thought I’d talk about some of the many children’s Xmas specials that lurk on iPlayer and beyond at this festive time. Back in the eighties, Christmas specials weren’t such a big deal – and especially with American series, UK programme schedulers didn’t really care, so you’d end up watching them in March or something.

Now, every kids’ TV show seems to have a raft of seasonal specials (including Halloween episodes, WTF) and they actually line them up to go out at the right time. On top of this – and possibly this is middle age talking – there is… more Christmas season. People put their trees up earlier and earlier, Christmas jumper days are a thing, there are Elves on the Shelves (this creepy little surveillance state/additional emotional labour mofo is not coming anywhere near my house, thanks). There is just a lot of Xmas real estate that simply wasn’t here last century.

Luckily, there is also more TV for little people to watch while you attend to all this.

Octonauts Xmas specials

Octonauts has been going for over a decade and they have literally covered every creature that dwells in the briny depths (hence why they’ve had to come up with Octonauts: Above and Beyond and start on land-based life forms) but in that time they’ve come up with two banging Christmas specials. Octonauts: A Very Vegimal Christmas centres on the vegimals, the animal-vegetable hybrids in the crew which talk in meep morp spork language (you know what I mean).

There has been much speculation about their origin story. Created in a lab? The result of some Octolab gene editing experiment? Oompa-loompa-esque slaves of a colonial system? Yeah, turns out I’m not the only weirdo who overthinks children’s television. Anyway, the vegimals have their own, perfectly benign, origin story, told in this episode, which should extinguish any weird theories.

…my theory is that the octonauts exist in a timeline where the human race has wiped itself out through nuclear war so animals have evolved to take our place, there must be enough latent radiation remaining to cause genetic aberrations like the Vegimals to mutate though, this kind of backs that theory up!

Oh, right. Thanks, Albertjweasel on Reddit.

It also contains tropes galore. Instruction videos! It was all a dream! A giant blob of snot which is really relatable to any parents surviving winter flu season! There’s also Octonauts and the Great Christmas Rescue, in which they travel to the childhood home of Professor Inkling (the M/Gandalf/Picard of the Octoverse). At this undersea mountain they need to rescue a rare species of golden coral, and Inkling's little octopus nephew, Squirt.

Loads of Julia Donaldsons

Everyone loves Julia Donaldson… I think they’re fine. They rattle along nicely if you read them aloud, the Axel Scheffler illustrations are great, but I don’t quite get the level of hype they receive. Still, all the canonical biggies (The Gruffalo, Snail and the Whale, Stickman, Highway Rat, Superworm, etc.) have been made into animated epics by the BBC. Gruffalo and Snail have a sort-of reverse Die Hard* problem: although Christmas is never mentioned or depicted, they were made and marketed as seasonal event TV.

Big names come as standard (Helena Bonham Carter, Rob Brydon, Olivia Colman, David Tennant, and so on) and the animation is lush. I find them a bit… bland. I like a bit more cheeky subversion, a bit of Aardman, a bit of Ant and Dec on SM:BC, but I appreciate that isn’t for everyone and at Christmas you want something three generations of family can sit down and watch in Peace. The peacefulness is a big part of it: these books take five minutes to read! The programmes last half an hour! So even with

Rob Brydon

Speaking

Really

Really

Slowly

While an insect nibbles a leaf with a beautiful orchestral soundtrack

They

Still

Have lots of long gaps in the narrative

Which

Seems a bit boring to me.

Sorry.

CBeebies Christmas Pantos

Now these, my friends, are the absolute business. If you like panto, obviously. (Oh yes, I do!) All of the CBeebies stars get their kit on, tread the boards, and ham it up to the max. Andy, Justin, Evie, George… There’s something for everyone (including readers who might like to see Maddie Moate dressed as a mouse) This year’s edition is Beauty and the Beast, which includes the dad from Molly and Mack as “Snow Raven” so there’s a little treat for the mums as well. All the old ones are on iPlayer. I’m afraid they’ve all blurred into one, but I enjoyed Andy cast against type as a baddie (he’s good, and I’m from York so my panto standards are sky high) and Justin is living in that dame outfit.

We’ll be back before Christmas with our thoughts on everything from Richard Curtis to cute baby dragons… in the meantime, try not to plough through too many days of your chocolate calendar.

*For less terminally online readers, there’s an endless debate on the internet about “is Die Hard a Christmas film?” because it's an action film, but set at Christmas time. We may end up discussing this further in the next issue. Or we might not, because it’s kind of done at this point.

I also have to confess that I’ve been watching Rivals instead of writing this. It’s as good as everyone says: if you want 800 words of my thoughts on it, leave a comment or drop me a note and if enough of you ask, I’ll do it.

But I do actually have a “job” to do here: talk about children’s TV, not the grown-up stuff (Alex Hassell’s chin should get a BAFTA). And it is high time we talked about Tik Tak. Not Tik Tok! Nobody is suggesting your children should watch Tik Tok, in fact it’s probably best if they don’t. Tik Tak is an utterly delightful Belgian Flemish* show designed to support toddlers’ cognitive development.

Tik Tak popped up on CBeebies in 2020, when the twins were the perfect age for it. It doesn't have dialogue or a story, just lots of abstract images: patterns made out of blocks, animations where a chameleon changes colour, wooden balls which ricochet around a maze (my personal favourite) and a sort of shadow drawing in a book at the end. I could try and explain it more, but it’s only five minutes: you might as well watch it. It’s on iPlayer and here on YouTube.

It is a work of genius with many layers, like a little Fabergé egg for two-year-olds. It has structure: each episode starts with some sheep coming through a door, and ends with the shadow book. Toddlers love structure. It is all about recognising patterns, which is a massive part of counting, reading, basically everything you need to learn for the next two decades. And it is so, so calm. It just goes at their pace. Trying to get anywhere with a toddler is hard, because if they see a leaf with a ladybird on it, or raindrops running down a bus window, they want to stare at it for 20 minutes (or have a meltdown because they didn’t want to go out in the first place). Tik Tak scratches that same itch, but indoors. Genius.

Flanders Classics

I thought Tik Tak was the brand-new product of extensive research into how toddlers’ brains develop and dozens of educational consultants, but, much like Mio Mao, it turns out to be a reboot of an old show. My friend Antonia, who is half-Welsh, half-Flemish and grew up watching the original version tells me that she was “stunned” to see it pop up on CBeebies, and that in 1980s Belgium, it was followed by a show called Plons, de gekke kikker which also sounds amazeballs.

You can see a lot of the 1980s episodes here on YouTube: the format is basically the same, just the graphics are a lot more old school and the children’s outfits are brilliant. (When did we stop dressing children in corduroy dungarees and rainbow everything? This look is so due a comeback.) The program’s creators came up with the idea after they saw how fascinated children were by the broadcast of a lottery draw. The predictable, repetitive mix of colors, movement and musical rhythms were then developed in the program, Tikipedia tells me. It is honestly mesmerising in its simplicity, like staring at a Zen garden with music.

Tik Tak comes with a word of warning though: it can be too gently hypnotic. Say, hypothetically, two very smart, active, involved grandparents in their early seventies sit down to watch it, having promised to cook fishfingers for the toddlers they're minding… everyone will sit there happily watching it for half an hour without even turning the oven on. Teenage cousins will put down their phones and end up watching several episodes “just to see” if the sheepdog comes out after the sheep in the opening segment. I dread to think what would happen if you showed it to a sofa full of hungover students. Nobody would leave the house for days.

Screening Test

I know there’s a lot of ~discourse~ about children and screens, and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. At the start, you get a grace period where babies can’t really perceive anything other than light and movement, so you can absolutely sit on a sofa all day watching 30 Rock while you feed them (the baby is obviously looking at you, from the same chin-tastic angle you get when you accidentally open the wrong phone camera). Then there’s the “baby-friendly” black and white high-contrast videos, but I’m sceptical of these: just give them a black and white board book, then they can chew it as well.

There are some WHO guidelines which say two-year-olds can have an hour of sedentary screen time a day… I cannot think of a better way to spend that than twelve episodes of Tik Tak. Make yourself a cup of tea, prepare to engage in some low-level but brain-enhancing (their brains, not yours) about whether a peacock or a baboon is hiding behind the puzzle cube, close the curtains and stay in!

* As I’m sure you all know, Belgium is really a federal state consisting of Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. One way this is reflected is having a different broadcasters for each bit – and Tik Tak is so Flemish. The pub quiz question in all of this is that the Eurovision entry swaps sides each year, like the custody agreement for a child of divorce. Since 2021, Flemish VRT has been in charge for the odd years while (French-speaking) Walloon RTBF has been in charge for even years, with both sharing the broadcasting rights. Tastes vary, but I’d probably say the Flemish entries have been stronger overall. But I also love Wallonia!! If you’ve never been to Liège, consider this my 2025 city break recommendation ;)

Mighty Mike centres on Mike, a true gentleman of a pug, trying to keep his owners’ stunning home immaculate while attempting to win the heart of a Chinese crested dog called Iris. The baddies are two racoons, Freddie and Mercury, and an adorable kitten and three turtles are roped into the endless cycle of physics-based pranks, pratfalls, and pans hitting protagonists in the face. There’s no dialogue, no story arc and no real character development. It’s brilliant.

Watching the vast array of wholesome content aimed at toddlers, I had started to wonder where the laughs were. So much giving, sharing and caring, but nobody running off a cliff with their legs still moving in the air.  In my young day, there was a lot of Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes and Tex Avery still on TV. Dangerous quicksand, setting up elaborate stunts involving TNT, ironing boards and piano springs, or just getting whacked in the face with a skillet: from an early age, we learnt that there was nothing funnier than trying to violently maim your enemy, only to have the stunt backfire. If you want to see this (but minus the racism, and plus robot hoovers) then Mighty Mike is for you.

The house is a stunnnnnning mid-century villa which would easily get 1200 words out of . Infinity pool, backdrop of (I think) the US West Coast, one episode hinges on Mike trying to preserve order before a team from Architectural Digest arrive for a photoshoot. Every mod con is included: yoga balls, smart speakers, drones, nerf guns. You name it, it's there and ready to catapult a raccoon into the air. 

The setting is flawless: Eames chairs, the Vitra coat hook, a Noguchi coffee table… It’s everything you’d want from a Modern House listing. Yes, your children are laughing because a kitten has swallowed an iPhone and the torch light is coming out of its eyes – but you, a sophisticated adult, are wondering if the kitchen is Sub Zero and Wolf. While laughing at a pug getting whacked in the nads with a piñata bat.

Mighty Mike is the kind of stupid slapstick comedy it’s actually very hard to do well, and I have nothing but respect for the team behind it. It has a neat little consistent internal universe, the peril is never too great (everyone is always happy, safe and friends again at the end of each episode) and the comic timing of how to blast a kitten and three turtles out of  cooker vent so they can do a formation skydive back to earth is perfection. It makes abundant use of bullet time, the visual effect that made our jaws drop when we saw it in The Matrix, but is now available to animate naughty raccoons stealing jamon iberico in a wheelbarrow.

It has a lot in common with Grizzy and the Lemmings, to the extent I wondered if it was made by the same people, although I don’t think it actually is. The twins will not watch this, so I asked my cousin, because she has slightly older boys who love it. Grizzy – a bear – lives in a cabin, but is constantly plagued by lemmings who are trying to steal his “Yummy” (a thinly-disguised Nutella). 

“From what I’ve seen Grizzy spends a fair amount of time trying to keep the lemmings out of the cabin,” says my cousin, who is confusingly also called Frances. “You could say it’s a modern day classic cartoon rivalry, like Roadrunner and Coyote or Tom and Jerry, with lots of slapstick, characters getting squished by falling objects then walking away unharmed, or running up to the edge of a cliff and nearly falling off but getting rescued at the last moment.” Yes, I will say that, nice one Fran.

The lemmings also do a good line in disco parties too, and occasionally a larger predator turns up to attack the cabin, so the lemmings and Grizzy have to unite in order to defeat a common enemy. The boys’ favourite episodes include ‘Umbrella Tactics’, ‘Cabin on Ice’, ‘Extreme Dominos’ and ‘’Couch Wrestling’, but they say they’re all really really funny. 

For various reasons, everything can feel a bit tough right now. I hate the clocks changing: it’s dark, cold, and generally a bit miserable until all the Christmas stuff begins (which, as an adult, isn’t exactly effort-free). So if you want to put on something very silly, and I mean absolutely ridiculously silly, go and watch Mighty Mike. Every episode is on ITVX, and there’s loads of them on YouTube as well. Grizzy is on iPlayer and YouTube. Right, I’m off for a Nutella sandwich.

*I once stayed at The Danieli while working for Bloomberg and skipped this. Putting a TV in the room in an actual Venetian Palazzo did seem a bit like sticking an eyebrow piercing on the Mona Lisa, have some respect. Best club sandwich ever, btw.

The girls are in the throes of Year One and let me tell you I’m looking at their little “difficult trigraphs” reminder on the fridge and thinking “wow, this is a really inefficient and complicated way to convey sounds and therefore meaning.” You can say what you like about German (and I often do) but the fact is, if you see a German word you don’t know, you can at least pronounce it correctly. English? Just guess and hope. Every week some poor undergrad on University Challenge gets their pronunciation gently corrected by Amol Rajan when answering the question correctly and my heart goes out to them, it just seems so unfair.

Anyway, since having twins/the panny D, I had basically forgotten how to read books and was genuinely terrified that my ability to do so had gone forever, but somehow, this summer, in the midst of chicken pox, I got back on the horse and managed to read the following stack of books. I want to thank and this Substack post in particular for making me think about a spreadsheet, too. I even took a picture of them, like I’m on TikTok or something. 

Huge shout out to for Pity Party, which is funny, a real page-turner, and had a twist I did NOT SEE coming so I won’t spoiler anyone; I will be forever grateful for its existence for restarting my reading career. Princess Caroline Murat is the bonkers memoir (it’s not name-dropping… it’s name-carpet-bombing) of Napoleon’s great-niece, written in exile in England after the Franco-Prussian War. Britney… had a very patient ghostwriter and her sad tale has made me think less of Justin Timberlake; at the same time, I still want to go and see him next summer. And Alan Cumming, who I’ve loved since Bernard and the Genie, is as good at writing as he is at acting.

Anyway, let’s talk about CBeebies bedtime stories, reading, and the celebrity-industrial complex.

Big Names, Small Books

How do you get small children into reading? Obviously the main answer is… reading to them. There’s content galore out there about the best children’s books, so I won’t start off down that route, but “TV presenter reads story to children” has been a staple of the format for decades. 

The BBC has decided to capitalise on this with the CBeebies Bedtime Story monolith, where actual A-listers (Kylie! Elton! Dolly!) read new and classic children’s books while the onscreen image Ken Burns-es across the pictures from the book. It is also the last thing on before they close down CBeebies at 19.00 sharp every day; I’ve written before about my love of linear television and having an external, neutral, force announce that IT IS BEDTIME NOW, THE TV IS LITERALLY ENDING is a great thing IMHO.

But which is the best CBeebies bedtime story? That is a tricker question. The first knot to untangle is probably what matters more: the text or the reader? Imagine I’m wiggling my fingers into air quotes and raising an eyebrow as I say this: as a writer, I’d love to say the written word takes precedence. But Alan Cumming got me thinkg about performance as a concept and, if it were that simple, we wouldn’t bother putting on Hamlet again and again, would we?

I’m therefore going to say, for your child the definitive version of any children’s book is the one you read to them (aaaaw). A standout bedtime story reading probably owes more to the reader than the text itself; also, the CBeebies producers seem to give bigger names more famous books, making it an inherently unfair playing field.

Fit for Purpose

The next factor is the viewer’s, uh, feeling towards the reader. There’s a reason this household has watched Mark Ronson read Pom Pom Gets the Grumps multiple times, and it’s not the story. (In fact, I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t tell you the story, despite having instigated every single one of those viewings.) The BBC know exactly what they are doing. Grandma’s watching the kids? Here’s Richard E Grant, or Michael Palin. Grandpa’s turn? Kristin Scott Thomas. You like Tom Hardy? Here he is, with a cute dog to boot (apparently his agent called CBeebies and asked if they wanted him… legend). Harry Kane, Harry Styles, actual Lionesses, whatever floats your boat… CBeebies Bedtime thirst trap, more like.

There’s also the joy of watching very famous people get really into it. I asked subscribers for suggestions for this, and – who writes the excellent Crib Notes, another important part of my “reading again” journey – says that Tom Hiddleston reading Supertato was “mesmerising,” and it is; he brings genuine, BAFTA-level gravitas to the freezer aisle. “It's like bedtime stories casts a lens of hotness onto these men,” she notes, and I can only agree.

Fame will only get you so far, though, and I think you need a bit of old-school radio/stage experience to really nail the Bedtime Story. Look at Jason Momoa. No, not that way, get a grip. Aquaman recently read Julia Donaldson’s Tiddler. Tiddler is the story of an exaggeration-prone fish who one day gets caught in a net, but finds his way back to school as various marine life forms recognise his epic stories. Like all Donaldson books, it is everywhere all the time; many parents could recite it with ease.  

But Jason simply doesn’t read it very well. Tiddler’s greatest virtue is the metre – it just rattles along. The rhyme, the rhythm, it reads itself. Except Jason adds in the odd word, so it doesn’t scan, and at one point just gets it wrong; at the dramatic climax, where a plaice shows Tiddler the way back, he says “I don’t recognise his face” instead of “don’t I recognise your face?,” thus rendering the whole thing unintelligible. Now, look, for very obvious reasons, I don’t want to start a beef with Jason Momoa, and who knows what kind of a day he’d had before some rando gave him a book and cardigan, maybe he didn’t have time to practice, maybe they only had time for one take, maybe he’s more of a Gruffalo guy? But the fact is, it could have been done better.

Funny, Smooth, Eyebrows

I often wonder how they film these – are the celebs passing through for The Graham Norton Show or something, and they make them read a bedtime story as part of a contractual agreement in a cupboard next to the green room? Do they just decamp to Broadcasting House and film all the Radio 2 presenters together in one day? The sports ones are often in actual stadia, do they just take advantage of having a camera crew there and shoot them after play? Does that mean every BBC camera operator has to pass bedtime story filming 101 in case they’re stuck in a lift with Beyoncé, or something? 

However they film them, I feel like there’s a certain kind of grown-up who just understands the assignment. My friend Charles suggested Rowan Atkinson reading Nadia Shireen’s The Bumblebear, and it’s a great shout. Rowan Atkinson is just so, so funny; there’s something about his voice, his face that just works. The guy was Mr. Bean!! I also love him reading Dogs in Disguise which, for my money, is even funnier.

Have a flick through iPlayer: Celia Imrie, Annette Badland, Lenny Henry, Stephen Fry…. look, if they can recount an anecdote which involves Kenneth Branagh, they’re probably a good Bedtime Story-er. Louis Theroux is excellent as well, reading Peggy The Always Sorry Pigeon. Then there’s a kind of innate charm some people just have: rates Nadiya Hussein over “A-list megastars” and he makes a good point.

When I started writing this, I thought I’d just pick a “best” one, but then I realised there were bedtime stories I remember watching which have disappeared from iPlayer. Some of them are knocking around on odd corners of the internet (here’s Patrick Stewart in the wrong aspect ratio with Russian subtitles). I know when I started this Substack I said I wasn’t going to do journalism, but I cracked and phoned the BBC Press office, because I felt sure Alan Cumming had done one, but they assure me hasn’t. 

Still, I feel I can’t make a definitive choice with only partial information, so I will simply say that the smoothest choice remains anything read (ok, sung) by Gregory Porter, the funniest is probably Steve Carrell reading the Eyebrows of Doom and I find Lora Fachie reading The Black Book of Colours incredibly moving. 

A few months ago, editor Tom and I asked, why isn’t The High Life on iPlayer? Mysteriously, it appeared just recently. So I’m going to attempt to wield this strange power again and ask… when are the BBC going to put all the old bedtime stories back on iPlayer? And… when do we get to see Alan Cumming? He’d be great.

Oh, Beehave

Back when she hit the button, Melissa nominated “Biene Maja as your first polyglot challenge... It is classic of the genre but I think still current enough that it gets played to actual German speaking toddlers to hypnotise them into silence for ten minutes at a time.”  

Maya the Bee, as she’s known in English, is a global children’s TV stalwart. Maya is a bit of a free spirit who does not want to conform to the regimented lifestyle of your average bee, but instead goes off into the meadow, befriends a bunch of other insects including a Grasshopper called Flip, and has cute little adventures – a manic pixbee dream girl, if you will.

The first film of Biene Maia was made in 1926, was silent, and starred real bees filmed by the author of the 1912 book, Waldemar Bonsels. As much as I wanted to watch this and pull an epic PSYCH! moment on you all by reviewing it instead of the modern version, I can’t. I don’t have ready access to the Bundesarchiv, it’s gone from MUBI, and Bonsels disappointingly (if predictably) turned out to love the whole Nazi thing, so reluctantly I had to shelve this idea. There goes my Saturday night watching silent black and white bees that may or may not have tried to steal the young Marlene Dietrich’s jam sandwich on a neighbouring UFA sound stage. 

Apollenly Cheap, but Charming

The next version, which everyone from Turkey to Finland recalls with great fondness was a 1970s anime production. The entire series is available here on YouTube, I put it on after bedtime to have a quick peek for the sake of a few jokes and… I’m on episode 3 already 😂 It is absolutely of its time. I was going to write “you know the kind of thing” but then I remembered I watched a LOT of animation growing up and you, dear reader, may not have done. So I’ll elaborate.

The kind of thing I mean: the backgrounds have a sort of less-detailed Studio Ghibli look, the actual cel animation is eye-wateringly cheap (think one character’s mouth moving at a time while everything else is still) and they re-use the same shots a lot. The music sounds like Eurovision when they still had a live orchestra (that’s a compliment), there’s a semi-narrator character who regularly breaks the fourth wall, and the dubbing (I couldn’t find it in the original German, entschuldigung) is in those old-fashioned squeaky RP voices which sound strange to our modern ears but probably reflect decades of repertory theatre and we'll never hear the like of them again😢.

This said… it is quite, quite charming. It is slow and episodic in a way that children often like. The seventies vibes are immaculate. Flip the Grasshopper talks a lot about eating grass, and I’m willing to bet everyone involved in the production was smoking it. It also has some dark undertones. In the episode I’m on, a dragonfly is telling Maya how the drones all get killed after mating, to a Burt Bacharach-esque soundtrack? “What if people really are bad and tear our wings and legs off?” asks Maya in an echoey internal monologue? I don’t think I will show this to my children.  It might explain a lot about Gen X, though.

Also, if you’re the kind of person that subscribes to my ramblings, you’re probably also the kind of person who wants to read a German Rolling Stone article about the Schlager singers who’ve performed the theme song over the years, and Borussia Dortmund fan anthem it inspired (both bees and BVB are black and yellow).

The Sting in the Tale

The version which I think Melissa actually wanted me to watch was the 2012 Franco-German reboot. The first thing I need to mention is that the urban myth about people drawing rude pictures in the background of children’s shows was… actually true? Someone drew a very basic diagram of a beenis (sorry) in the background of a four second tracking shot? Which I can’t believe someone complained about – just tell them it’s a fairy archway carved on the rocks in the woods and get on with your day – but whatever.

Anyway, we tried to watch it, we really did. The animation has a massive glow up and is in pretty decent 3D computer animation. But the girls were… not gripped. Not remotely. I texted a friend who lives in Germany and has children slightly older than mine, to ask if they’d liked it. “I'm afraid she never really liked Maja the bee,” he replied. “My most vivid memory was that we watched the movie at the cinema with her when she was around five, and she found it so scary that she hid under the seats :)”

We tried to watch the series, but the girls wandered off and there were more dung beetles than I could face at that point (for reasons I won’t go into). We tried to watch the film, but after the deeply Kafka-esque emergence of the baby bees from the honeycomb, it got both too plotty – the Queen’s advisor tries to frame the Hornets for the theft of the royal jelly, and makes it look as if Maya was their accomplice – and too perilous. Why is the peril so overdone in children’s films? At some point I need to summon the courage write about Paw Patrol the Movie. 

Auf Deutsch, und ausgezeichnet

But for now, I will just say that if you really want to watch TV in German with very small children, Patchwork Pals is excellent. It's a bunch of patchwork embroidery animals who live on a quilt and have to peacefully coexist (despite the fox constantly wanting to eat everyone). The episodes are short and easy to follow and orchestra provides lovely music. You can watch it in the original German here, or it's in English on iPlayer. Or you could just brew a herbal tea and watch the seventies Biene Maja 😉 Viel spass! 

A message from our sponsor (and a huge sidebar about motherhood)

In addition to reviewing her chosen show, I will also use my immense, Bono-esque platform to pass on Melissa’s favourite message: get a smart meter (she works for Ofgem). I have known Melissa for nearly 20 years: she was my housemate’s boss the first time I lived in Brussels. After nearly two decades of living all over the world, we’re now a few miles apart in London. We do things like go to the musical of Dorian Gray, the restaurant inside Brixton Prison, and the odd cheeky midweek Jean Genet play, which makes her a total legend IMHO. She is also very kind for subscribing, especially as she doesn’t have children, so ostensibly has little to gain from reading a Substack about children’s TV. 

I could just move on, take the compliment (she’s obviously here for the writing, lol) and leave it with my thoughts on the many versions of Maya the Bee. But I’m going to take a moment to veer off course into the murky waters of the endless child-free/childless not by choice/ambivalent about parenthood/living to be a mum discussion – and more importantly, the power of friendships that survive this. The algorithm presents me with so, so many problem pages where people say they don’t see their friend any more now they have had, or not had, children. So many!

My thoughts, in two paragraphs (any editors reading this who want 2,000 immaculately-crafted words on this, get in touch) is that, on a practical level, it just takes a bit of effort and compromise on both sides. Your friend is having a break-up and needs moral support? Get someone else to do bedtime and go out for dinner without the kids. Your friend is exhausted chasing after toddlers? Come to the park with her, buy everyone hot chocolate, and chase them round for a bit, too.

On a philosophical level, it’s a bit trickier. There’s a fundamental imbalance, namely that everyone who has children knows what it’s like to not have children; we can remember what it was like before. If you haven’t had them, you don’t know what it’s like. That’s not a good or a bad thing, it just kind of… is? And likewise, none of us can know what anyone else is going through inside. People who wanted children but couldn’t have them (there’s a book about this by Kat Brown), people who couldn’t have as many children as they wanted, people with more children than they planned for, people who regret parenthood…. It’s a wild world out there!

A note from editor Tom, who doesn’t have children: I also think there's a thing where both sides can overcorrect and misjudge the other's desires. Non-child people can write off parents for years, on the assumption that on the vanishingly rare nights they're free they will still be too tired to do anything. And parents can over-interpret from their memories of pre-child times and assume that the childless won't want to do anything that doesn't involve, like, shots and clubbing until 4am – forgetting that while they haven't had kids, they've still GOT OLDER. The experience imbalance is real, but both halves of it are working off imperfect information and assumptions.

This is a great point, cannot believe everyone’s tequila slammer era is over. It was good while it lasted. Time to bake a banana bread, pour out some small-batch artisanal mead, and toast Maya the Bee. To conclude: Melissa says get a smart meter.

Anyway, I have a theory about children’s TV: I call it the “reverse pink tax,” or RPT. 

The backstory: after decades of making absolute claptrap for girls, TV executives realised that sweet sunshine sparkle best-friends-forever pink cupcake glitter party (and of course, the boy equivalent – space dino robot rocket infinity warfight eternity EX plus Alpha) wasn’t doing anyone any favours. So they decided to dial it back a bit.

However, they dialled it back a lot. And so now you get the Reverse Pink Tax, in the form of a free STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and life skills education in almost every show “for girls”. (Yes of course, boys can and do like them too!!). Every pink cupcake extravaganza is actually a Trojan Horse for some “you can do anything” inspirational learning experience*. Yes, I’m looking at you, Gabby and your “growth mindset”. 

I first thought about the RPT ages ago, while watching Bitz and Bob, a show in which a little girl called Bitz and her brother Bob use engineering to solve all sorts of problems in their imaginary world. Bitz is a “steampink adventurer”. You may have heard of steampunk, the sci-fi subgenre where people wear goggles and fly around in hot air balloons (don’t @ me, I’m saying this from a place of love, I was literally in a Professor Elemental music video).

Every episode of B&B is interrupted with a solid two minutes of blueprint-style diagrams of projectiles, pulleys, hydraulic systems and so on, which to me feels very “here comes the science bit” but it passes the time pleasantly enough.

But the RPT has been uppermost in my mind this week because we’ve binge-watched the whole of Princess Power on Netflix, in which hang-gliding, science-loving, trouser-clad Princesses improve the lives of their citizens. Sorry, “fruitizens”  – because the whole thing has a fruit theme going on, with a slight quirk that all the Kiwi kingdom stuff is purple. The girls are obsessed. I haven’t seen them ask for a show this much since the great Tish Tash half-term of 2023.

Princess Power has a lot to recommend it. The girls are vaguely human-shaped, not kawaii bobbleheads. There are four princesses from major fruit kingdoms: Kira Kiwi, Beatrice Blueberry, Rita Raspberry and Penelope Pineapple. They embrace their differences to help people and make their world a better place. The plots… are pretty solid and involve plenty of science, dressmaking, caring for animals or sports skills (each Princess has a speciality), as well as a lot of listening, teamwork, and problem-solving.

It is also fascinating to watch, as a grown-up, because it’s peak “Netflix has so much money and no idea what to do with it” imperial phase stuff. Queen Olivia Orange? That’s Jameela Jamil, who IMHO always sounds a lot like her character Tahani in The Good Place, but is undeniably very famous. Princess Bea has two dads, one of whom is played by Tan France, off both the UK and US versions of Queer Eye. And the great aunt? Oh, that’s only an actual EGOT, Rita Moreno. This is A-list RPT, darling.

I am not saying, lest anyone misconstrue my argument, that boys aren’t getting any educational shows. They are! But in the process of poking around to write this, I found an IMDb review that summed up my feelings perfectly: “Princess Power is yet another new show in Netflix's long line of cartoons aimed at little kids to teach them things. And this one is for the girls who love to be princesses.” 

Sometimes I think there could just be a bit more plotty adventure for adventure’s sake in today’s world. I grew up watching Mysterious Cities of Gold, and it never did me any harm. (Takes 10,000 paragraphs to get to the point, point is a red herring.) Every Princess is part character, part UN SDG values champion, which is a lot to put on our daughters’ shoulders.

But overall Princess Power is really good – and there’s one episode which I found really helpful in terms of trying to explain about different bodies and additional needs. (There are lots of questions about this at the moment.) In the episode, they play football (sorry, soccer, Americans gonna American) and Rita tries to help a blind girl. It is not an easy watch! As an adult you may well end up cringing about things you’ve said or done in the past! But it makes a lot of important points pretty nicely.

Another RPT show is Rainbow Rangers (Netflix), but it’s terrible: look at these reviews if you don’t want to take my word for it. Ostensibly about saving the planet (which we do actually need to do) the girls get summoned to help cute ickle fluffy animals, in a way which somehow manages to worry one’s children about the impending climate catastrophe without giving them anything constructive to do. Watch Octonauts instead.

This is ridiculously long, so I will conclude with a tiny little way to fight back against the original pink tax: buy men’s t-shirts, which are incredibly flattering and comfy! They are cut so forgivingly!! Seriously this long-sleeve t-shirt is £39 but buy one from the men’s section in Sainsbury’s (other supermarkets are available) and it will look just the same. Yes, of course we’re all insecure about our bodies when normal t-shirts are basically made out of clingfilm – meanwhile men have been enjoying toasty body tents this whole time? I tell you, go and try it. Also, suggest any other RPT shows in the comments section.

*Of course, there are many fantastic shows which are simply less “gendered” like Hey Duggee!, but we can talk about them another time – and Bluey, but that’s partly because about half the internet thinks she’s a boy. I thought she was a boy at first. It takes a lot decondition your brain from 1980s TV…

That’s such a cliché, isn’t it?? “Survived”, like it’s the Somme or something. It’s actually fine. In fact I asked the girls what their favourite part of the break was, and one of them said “having chicken pox… because we got so many surprises”, and my heart lit up. I did mum pretty hard through the chicken pox bits (treasure hunt, making cake pops, colour-in cardboard pirate ship from Lidl, sock full of porridge oats in bath). BUT ALSO we did go to Normandy and the Peak District, which I would argue were better than sticker books I’d hidden in the airing cupboard, but you know what? Play the hand you’ve got.

Now the twins are back at school I can finally turn to the contractual commitment I made to paid subscribers several months ago: namely, pay me and you can pick a TV show for me to write about. 

Just as with university reading lists, it makes sense to pick the easiest ones first, so I will start with CBeebies’ Molly and Mack – as nominated by Lucy (it’s easy because we already watched a load of episodes). Lucy is awesome: I met her twenty years ago (!!!) when we both lived in Paris and we did things like go to Bal de l’X at the Opera Garnier. Now we live in suburbs at opposite ends of London but she is still a total legend, thanks Lucy! (WOW this is better than Cameo, what a great time to subscribe, hit the button below). Her children love Molly and Mack.

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Molly and Mack is many things. It is extremely Scottish, very cute, and acts as a useful primer for the concept of a soap opera. It is set in the very SNP-coded “Big Hub,” a community space with different stalls, a children’s club and a cafe; imagine Affleck’s Palace, but founded by Jimmy Reid. Molly and her big brother Mack are usually at the centre of some drama which unfolds; their dad, a widower, runs the kids’ club. You get a couple of songs every episode (“I have an idea” and “Oops, Oh No”) both of which are annoyingly catchy.

It’s also a slow-burn romcom that unfolds over several series (SPOILER ALERT) the children set up their dad with Alice, a Big Hub stallholder, and series four concludes with a proper wedding episode: get ready to have a little happy cry.

Alice, as the theme tune tells us, runs the Near and Far Gift Stall. I wish I could look my children in the eye and tell them it’s possible to make a living flogging all the random bits and pieces one acquires while travelling. I’d be rich. Beautiful fold-out papercraft tram timetable from the 1958 Brussels Expo I found at a brocante? Oaxaca pottery jug I got as a freebie when covering the G20 in Mexico? Torch with a picture of Barack Obama’s face on it I bought in the absence of daylight while awaiting sunrise at the temple of Angkor Wat? As much as I love them, nobody is going to buy them. Alice is a peddler of lies.

Molly and Mack is also well worth watching for the ongoing, simmering feud between Moira (who runs the Big Hub) and Mrs Juniper, who manages the café. Joan Collins in Dynasty, generations of the landladies of the Rover’s Return, Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry… We love to see it. From constantly dissing each other's jobs, to wearing the same hat at the wedding, they’re a masterclass in female rivalry. Just watch the first two minutes of this episode. I’m sure it goes completely over the children’s heads, but it certainly makes me cackle away.

Just like Waffle the Wonder Dog, if you come in mid-series (very easy on normal, linear CBeebies) it can take a while to figure out who is whom. The huge casting win is that Molly and Mack genuinely look like siblings (as far as I know they’re not related IRL) so well done for that. On the other hand, Mack is supposed to be eight years older than Molly, but by the end, he looks waaay older. Casting teenagers is very difficult, a lot of people just go from 12 to 20 overnight while others take their sweet time; think of the “high schoolers” in Buffy or Saved by The Bell. 

Anyway, I was poking around in the process of writing this and found out James Mackenzie, who plays the dad, is the same age as my husband, and just gave up in despair; what is JM’s skincare regime? Or did years of riding bikes in all weather and enjoying real ales just take its course on my sweet love’s beautiful countenance? I have an idea… I might buy him some moisturiser for his birthday.

I’ll stop now. The series ended in 2022 (the Guardian also love it) but I suspect that means it will be on iPlayer for at least another decade. If the “I have an idea” song isn’t lodged in your brain already, don’t worry, it will be eventually…

Anyway, one twin is currently playing a “grab the sushi” game on a giant touch screen (didn’t have those in my young day) and the other is colouring in one of those foldable A4 paper hats (on the other hand, I think these were invented in the seventies), so I'm going to have a crack at writing this. But, as much as I love a ferry, it's not an environment which is conducive to long or clever thoughts. Paid subscribers: I absolutely will do your columns, but they are coming in September, promise.

The first thing to think about this week is The Paralympics (Channel 4, but also here). I had thought about writing a whole discussion of how we talk to children about bodies that are different, etc etc, I would love your thoughts, book recommendations, but it's now week five of the summer holidays and my brain is drifting like the seaweed I see out the windows. So instead I will just recommend two programmes that can be a useful part of this conversation. They are both on Channel 5’s Milkshake!, which means you have to negotiate the My5 app to see them. Good luck, I believe in you, xoxo

The first one is Mixmups, which follows three friends - Pockets, Giggles and Spin - who live in a helter-skelter house in Mixington Valley. Pockets is visually impaired, Giggles is a cat with curvature of the spine who uses a wheelchair and Spin is non-disabled and very boisterous. I got the last sentence off the website, because none of this is spelled out, they just are who they are, which is the genius of the show – it’s made by a team with lived experience of disability. The characters figure everyday fun things out in a way that works for them all. It is very nicely done and you can read more about it here.

The other is Meet the Experts, where young people explain their passions, from sea life to drumming. There are a whole bunch of episodes about sport, from baseball and gymnastics to equestrianism and powerchair football. I haven’t seen that many (more because of them scheduling it in the morning than anything else) but it’s really nicely made and definitely easier than trying to explain things yourself. I mean, they are literally experts.

The other thing we’ve been watching a lot of is The Very Small Creatures which popped up in the marble race/hamster maze depths of YouTube. It’s a spin-off from Morph (if you don’t know Morph, he’s a claymation 80s/90s British TV staple, the first breakout hit for the young Aardman Animations) and it’s BRILLIANT. So simple and cute and three minutes long.

I was like “how have I never seen this before” and then at the end it turns out it was on Sky Kids and that’s why. This is the Google Plus of kids’ TV, whom has ever seen anything from Sky Kids in the wild, is it even a channel? Anyway someone from the BBC/Disney+/Netflix needs to go and snap this up because it is ADORBS. (Some Googling suggests it might also be on Apple TV if you have that?)

OK, the last bit of Storm Lilian is hitting the channel right now, and even though it’s only the gentlest roll, I can’t look at a screen and type. So happy viewing and I’ll see you in September! 

The summer holidays are now well underway and the chances are you’ll be taking at least one long journey. Whether you are chartering a Gulfstream to the Maldives, driving the length of France, or sitting on the slow train to Skegness (underrated, massive beach), at some point, you will likely produce a phone, tablet or laptop to amuse your child.

And then you might realise 

• You’ve forgotten the headphones

• Children are small and wriggly and can’t keep headphones on their head

• If they can operate the headphones, they will crank the volume to 8000 decibels purely because they can, meaning everyone can hear everything and they’re battering their tiny delicate eardrums in the process

• The ambient hum of a passenger aircraft is around 60dB so they can’t hear anything through the headphones anyway

• You spent $$$ on child-size noise-cancelling headphones so they can’t hear the Gulfstream engines, but now Mummy is having a loud row with the on-board sommelier about which vintages of Krug are available so nobody can hear anything anyway. Mortifying.

In each of these situations, and many more, your need is the same – whether for the child’s happiness, your own sanity, or simply the desire to not get angry looks from everyone else in the carriage. You need something to watch with no dialogue.

(This theme is suggested by editor Tom Phillips, a veteran of the train between London and Cornwall, and thus very familiar with “surely the whole carriage would like to hear Fred and Pete in action” scenarios.)

The thing about dialogue is that small children aren’t that bothered about it anyway. I read somewhere they can’t follow a plot til they’re five.* They don’t follow the words at all, which was anecdotally proved during my favourite holiday to SunParks, the cut-price Belgian Center Parcs dubbelgangers. The twins happily watched Paw Patrol every morning while we assembled the pool stuff. I think it was day four when they finally remarked that the sound was funny… It was in Dutch, and had been the whole time. Klaar voor actie, Ryder, meneer!, as Chase says. 

Unlike teenagers, who apparently have the subtitles on all the time (WTAF), and we elder millennials, who complain that everyone has been mumbling on TV since The Wire, young children don’t really care. That’s why many of the best shows don’t really rely on the spoken word for storytelling – it’s just part of a greater whole.

As Ronan Keating once sang, “You say it best… when you say nothing at all.” (Please click the link to see the greatest use of puppets ever.)  Ireland’s blandest export since Kerrygold cheddar wasn’t wrong when it came to children’s TV: there are some absolute classics out there which contain not one word of dialogue. For the pedants: OK these shows are not completely silent, they have nonsense dialogue, and often excellent music. But they can easily be followed with no sound.

Shaun the Sheep stands head and shoulders above everything else in the “works with the sound off” canon. Made by Aardman of Wallace and Gromit fame, it features a taciturn farmer, Bitzer the sheepdog and a whole flock of sheep. The jokes are hilarious. The animation is beautiful. The pacing is perfect. You can watch it with no sound on and the only noise will be small children giggling, which you’d have to have a heart of stone to object to.

For some inexplicable reason, it’s on CBBC, which is aimed at slightly older children than CBeebies. I guess it’s because CBeebies has Timmy Time, which features Shaun’s cousin/nephew/some kind of relative discovering nursery. I can’t follow Timmy Time, it has too many characters and is quite noisy and chaotic, which is probably a good reflection of starting nursery, but not what you want to hear on a four-hour journey up the East Coast Main Line. Shaun is up there with Buster Keaton for telling a great story, silently.

There are about a million episodes of Shaun the Sheep (another point in its favour) and we haven’t seen anywhere near all of them. So I did what panicked parents always do in the middle of the school holidays, and asked my parents to help. My dad has always been a huge Aardman fan (shout out to anyone else who watched the VHS of all their early music videos and Creature Comforts about a million times in the 90s) so it wasn’t difficult to persuade him to watch a few.

 My favourites include the one where the sheep set up a disco in the barn and the one where they end up running a pizzeria that gets too popular. And my dad recommends Series 1/5 Scrumping, S1/33 Stick with me, and S6/7 Babysitter Bitzer. They come in at seven minutes which is ideal for sticking a couple on while you get the swimming things ready before getting everyone out of the static caravan (did you know they have dishwashers in now) and heading to the beach. They’re all on iPlayer, meaning you can download them ahead of long journeys.

Pingu: an oldie but a goodie, everyone’s favourite stop-motion pass-agg penguin is currently enjoying a renaissance. The subject of endless memes, he personifies millennial angst perfectly. Adulting? Noot noot. He’s been given a (NSFW, not child appropriate) voiceover in the form of Roadman Pingu who just cusses everyone out in sweary MLE. You can watch original, child-friendly, dialogue-free Pingu on Amazon Prime. Just calm everyone down after getting overheated in the sun by sticking it on and giving them an ice lolly, holiday gold.

Molang: We’ve talked about Molang before, but we’ve just been watching series four on Netflix and it’s brilliant. Molang, Piu Piu and the gang do Ancient Rome, the Odyssey, the tale of Excalibur, and the Court of the Sun King, in typical dayglo colours. Come September, you can look the teachers straight in the eye and say you’ve been introducing the kids of classical myths… the cutest introduction to history you can imagine.

Alien TV: We were introduced to this by slightly older visitors, but if you don’t mind a few fart/poo jokes, it’s actually very funny. An alien TV news crew comes to Earth and sends home reports about what we crazy humans get up to. It is fast, and silly, and do you need dialogue to find aliens attempting to get a haircut hilarious? No, you don’t. There is another show, called Floogals, which does the same concept in a more tasteful and educational way, with dialogue, that I also like. 

Alright, I will leave you in monastic silence to enjoy these gems. Do share your favourite quiet shows below, and happy travels!

* Let’s be honest, some adults never master this. Who’s that? Why is she reading the letter? Are they related? Some adults still don’t really understand the plot of The Third Man because they fell asleep watching it in the cinema, in Vienna, while on honeymoon, after too many cocktails and night trains. (I did go on the actual big wheel though, so stick that, cinema buffs.)

***

Last week I confidently explained how I’d sit down and watch the Olympics with my children, an idyll of inspirational and informative conversations about the incredible achievements of our finest athletes. How is that going for me? 

Well, I’m in a holiday cottage in the Peak District and I’ve just engineered a two screen set-up where the twins are watching Vegesaurs while the adults try to follow the Men’s All-Round Gymnastics with the sound down. They did watch the pairs diving, and one twin has decided she wants to be a BMX rider when she grows up... Take the wins where you get them.

The Peak District is great, I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve always been a fan – Jaipur, one of the finest beers of all time is from here (and not, as you might expect, Jaipur). But now I fully appreciate the vast array of wholesome family-friendly attractions.  We’ve only been here three days and we’ve climbed rocks, paddled in a stream, gone on a vintage tramway AND a cable car, and done a three-mile walk along a ridiculously picturesque footpath where you could eat wild strawberries. Also, new favourite pub just dropped, The Barley Mow in Bonsall. The sun is shining, which makes a huge difference, but even in the rain it would be awesome.

Anyway, given that the Olympics only happens every four years, I’m going to allow myself a second week of talking about it (normal service resumes next time, I promise). Who doesn’t love horsies, sorry, equestrianism? First of all, Monsieur le Vicomte, bring me my fainting couch… the horse stuff is at the Palace of Versailles, which looks incredible. I am not going to go into any depth on dressage, eventing, etc.; there are (understandably) strong opinions and I don’t want to get my facts wrong. 

But I will put the case for watching the Modern Pentathlon.

Horsing Around

If you’re unfamiliar with it, modern pentathlon (I want to start calling it Moddy P, but this is even less likely to catch on than Snappy G) has five elements:

• Fencing

• Swimming

• Running

• Shooting

• Riding… on a random horse which is allocated in a draw just 20 minutes before they compete.

There’s a guide to the precise format this year here and it takes place from August 8-10. Why do I, a person who can honestly be described as “extremely unsporty” (even after my summer training with the Belgian women’s cricket team) love modern pentathlon? Here are five reasons (five… do you see what I did there??). 

1. Crazy origin story

Did you read The Prisoner of Zenda at an impressionable age? I did, and it is so Modern Pentathlon. The brainchild of Olympics (re)founder baron Pierre de Coubertin, he wanted an event that would test the strengths of a “complete” athlete. The idea is that it’s the daring escape of a 19th-century cavalry soldier behind enemy lines: he must ride an unfamiliar horse that he’s liberated from his foe’s stables, fight enemies with pistol and sword, swim across a moat, and then run back to his own regiment. And, possibly, a Princess. It has been through many modernisations since then, and has a new 90-minute final decider format this time round.

2. The #drama, and what comes next

Do you remember all the horse chaos from four years ago? Short version: horse told one of the favourites mid-round that it didn’t fancy jumping today, she wept as her medal hopes went poof, her coach then punched the horse. It was all very sad and started a whole bunch of discourse, both online and real world, about the format of the sport (this is not how one escapes from behind enemy lines any more), and ultimately whether horses should be involved at all.

As I said above, I’m just a spectator and am not going to get into a debate where I know very little. Especially not a debate where talking points include an interview with a fictional, resurrected Baron de Coubertin and the challenge of finding enough unfamiliar horses in a world where they are no longer the primary means of transport. Then there’s Obstacle, the planned Gladiators-esque replacement for the show-jumping (could Legend compete for Team GB?), and the tension between athletes, the UIPM (Moddy P’s governing body), and the IOC. But I am happy to follow it at a distance in an internet rabbit hole way.

In the process of writing/thinking about this, Editor Tom came up with what I consider to be a fully-fledged banger of an idea, so we present it in full here. UIPM, drop us an email if you want to go with it. Grace Webb can be a brand ambassador for the whole thing.

A modest proposal for how a horse-free Modern Pentathlon could stay as an Olympic sport without indulging in ridiculous Total Wipeout-style obstacle courses: simply bring the original concept up to date. As movies have taught us for generations now, a soldier escaping from behind enemy lines wouldn’t jump on a horse any more – they’d steal a motorbike. Thus, the Pentathlon should introduce a motocross segment. This would have the benefit of being in keeping with the spirit of the event, testing the competitor’s skill at handling an unfamiliar mode of transport – every competitor would get the same model, with no opportunity to make adjustments, because let’s face it you wouldn’t if you were nicking an enemy bike – and more importantly, it would look cool as heck. 

Do motorbikes maybe not feel very… Olympicy? Sure: motor vehicles have traditionally been a no-no in the Games, thanks to a longstanding rule in the Olympic charter that prohibited events “in which performance depends essentially on mechanical propulsion”. But that rule got dropped in recent years, the IOC and FIA have been making eyes at each other for over a decade now, and motorsports were even on the longlist for inclusion in 2028. 

In that context, adding motorbikes to Pentathlon is a no-brainer. You get to introduce a bit of motorsport in a way that won’t irk the purists: it’s just one discipline in a larger event, and if they’ve all got the same bike then you remove the worry that the winner is simply the person with the most expensive team of mechanics. Also maybe they could go Full Cruise and finish the event by riding the bike off a cliff? Admit it: you’d watch that.

3. Valuable Lime Lesson

Do you remember when that Belgian shotputter ran the 100m hurdles to stop her team getting disqualified from the European Championships? What an absolute hero. So much of the Olympics is about years and years of training to be good at one incredibly specific thing,  hence why the world’s best shotputters look absurd in a sprint. But life isn’t actually like that, is it? There’s a lot to be said for being an all-rounder (I like the triathlon and the heptathlon, too) and I see it as a bit of a nod to that. It might be a good day for swimming but a bad day for laser pistol and life’s just like that, isn’t it?

4. Joe Choong (MBE)

Everyone’s always talking about Emma Raducanu, but she’s not the only famous athlete from Kent/London commuter belt. (I love Bromley, the panto last year was great and The Glades is better than any Westfield). Let’s take a moment to appreciate Joe, who won gold in the Modern Pentathlon in Tokyo. In fact, I probably take too many moments to appreciate Joe, whose average Instagram post looks like this

Joe was reportedly on team “keep the horses” in the great Modern Pentathlon debate and I challenge anyone to look at this photo and not want to keep them. 

I conclude this section with apologies to my husband, whom I love dearly. If I were a Victorian governess being held in a high tower by a moustache-twirling Baron with wicked intentions, Joe would be my first choice of rescuer. But I’m actually a copywriter with twins in Sydenham who never has to think about what’s for dinner, because Pete’s mastered all the big hits from the Melissa Clark dinner repertoire (both the first book and InstantPot version), made a meal plan, AND done the shopping, and is therefore the best person to be married to. Thank you Pete!

5. It may not be around for long

Because of the ongoing drama and the need to add cool sports like BMX, skateboarding and breakdancing (all of which I love) to the Olympics, Modern Pentathlon is slightly living on borrowed time. But surely it’s nice to hang on to a bit of tradition now and then? They took out Lacrosse and Tug of War; it seems churlish of the OG to eliminate its OG event. 

The official decision now is that this is the last ever Olympics with showjumping in the Modern Pentathlon, and in LA 2028, Obstacle will replace it. So you can watch it with your children and decades from now, they can say “I remember when there was unfamiliar horse showjumping in the Olympic Games,” like how the 10th President of the USA has a living grandson. Is this set in stone? Is anything ever? Guys, it’s not too late to call us about the Motocross thing ;)

If you have your own niche sports that deserve more attention, please do share them below.

I will do my best to stick to a weekly schedule for this newsletter, but I’m sure you’ll understand if there’s a slight lapse between now and September. This said, guilt is a powerful motivator – so there’s never been a better time to hit the subscribe button, to emotionally blackmail me into working. 

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This week, we’re talking about the Olympics – which I loved as a child, and still do. (If you’re not a sport addict, the Olympics begins this evening, and runs for two glorious weeks.) To watch the whole thing, you need Discovery+, but at this point adding another streaming service would make our household resemble the Dril candles tweet, so I’ve tried to include some scheduling details to watch it on the BBC. 

Driving me In-Seine

Because the Olympics is only held every four years, this is my first real attempt at watching it with children. I vaguely remember trying to show them some of Tokyo 20201, but between the time difference, the BBC App, and the fact they were two-and-a-half (absolute chaos age, sending hugs to everyone going through it) I didn’t get very far. So this entire post comes with a “this is hypothetical” tag and a huge sack of optimism, all because I vaguely remember watching the 1988 Seoul Olympics and loving them. This was mainly because I was allowed to go downstairs, make my own breakfast and switch the TV on insanely early. The absolute dream: 5.30 am Shreddies watching Fatima Whitbread…. I think it might have been downhill ever since, tbh.

The main reason it’s worth a crack is because, at five, my children understand the concepts of winning, losing and “running as fast as you can”, so we can but try. Which means we’ll start with the Opening Ceremony (Friday 26 July at 17.45 on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.) I love the Opening Ceremony, just because I love any big set-piece production with loads of stuff going on. Eurovision? The Oktoberfest Parade? Belgian National Day? Literally anything in this feature about set designer Es Devlin? I am unironically, wholeheartedly here for it. 

My favourite Opening Ceremony so far was London 2012, because the British Ambassador to Belgium threw a bang-up party where we watched it on a big screen while enjoying Belgian beer and canapés. And I love that kind of thing too. Do we have any idea what President Macron is planning after bringing his country to its knees with a little pre-summer political catastrophe amuse-bouche? I watched a sneaky 90-second trailer and it looks both incredible, and incredibly French – so much so that the dancers threatened to go on strike and ruin the whole thing. God, I miss living in Paris. But I’m sure we can recreate the same vibe in the living room with some fruit shoots and some rouleaux de saucisson for tea.

On Your Marks, Get Set… Go?

Obviously, every family is different: your children may already be able to follow tennis scoring or even understand the sailing. (LOL, as if anyone understands the sailing. An actual NATO Royal Navy guy once tried to explain regattas to me while we were competently sailing a yacht, and reader, I still have no clue.) But I think, for us, the watchable sports will be 1) things children can actually do, 2) things on wheels they can’t technically do yet but do look cool, 3) the sparkly wonder of gymnastics, and 4) horsies. Specifically, for #reasons, the Modern Pentathlon, which I’ll discuss at length in its own post next week.

Running, jumping, throwing… my guys can do them all, even cycling, thanks to The Pedal Project. (This is not sponcon: we paid for this and it’s worth every penny, if you want your children to ride a bike with zero drama.) So you can’t go wrong with watching the Athletics. If you want to go full “school sports day for grown-ups” vibe, the Steeplechase (Aug 4-7) is basically the obstacle course and a great watch. 

(Editor’s note: surely you have to be cautious about introducing them to the high jump and the pole vault? I seem to remember doing myself an injury trying the Fosbury Flop over a drying rack onto my parent’s bed.  Hmmmm, yes, I remember some unfortunate Fatima-inspired attempts at the javelin with a bamboo pole in the garden. Look, we all start somewhere.)

In terms of running really fast, the women's 100m final is at 20:20 BST on 3 August and the men’s is the next day at 20.50 so I guess all the other track and field stuff is… around then? And that’s already past bedtime so we’ll probably watch it again the next day on catch up. There’s a whole schedule here but in reality I bet I’ll end up poking around on iPlayer to watch it on catch-up, swearing under my breath. The Guardian has this excellent guide to why there isn’t as much live coverage as there used to be, and how to watch what there is.

I completely understand that the BBC is in a tough position about what it can spend money on. But one you’ve known the pleasures of “press the red button for rowing all afternoon long”, it’s hard to go back, especially given the lack of actual sport in the highlight programme. I know it’s very hypocritical of me, of all people, to complain about not getting to the point. But I want to watch the Olympics! Not a lovely human interest story about how the rugby sevens guys met! (No offence to rugby sevens. I mean, absolutely none. Look, I’m sure I spilled that pint anyway, entirely my fault, let me buy you another. Seven.)

On Your Bike/Skateboard…

In my first draft I had a complete brainfart (it’s the start of the summer holidays!) and forgot about this, but luckily Editor Tom had a helpful note: You absolutely do not need any more content for this newsletter but I am going to say that I think the BMX events would ABSOLUTELY BANG with kids, both the racing and the freestyle, Charlotte Worthington's history-making round was genuinely my number one moment of Tokyo, honestly just so amazing. 

He’s not wrong. The BMX is great to watch, in that “terrifying knife-edge between doing the coolest stunt ever and getting crushed by a falling bike” way. There’s freestyle, where they do tricks and stunts, and racing, which is high drama on a course which my brain can only describe as “lumpy-bumpy.” From my copywriting day job, I can tell you that the right lighting is crucial for success.

Then there’s skateboarding, which is #relatable for children in the sense that some of the contestants are… children. Watching Sky Brown in Tokyo brought on very conflicted feelings of awe that she could skateboard like that at 13, and absolute stomach-clenching fear that my own little babies might one day want to hurl themselves around a concrete skate park. Argh! She’s 16 now, and has a team-mate a year younger. Thinking back to going on school trips at that age… my heart goes out to the Team GB coaches and organisers. 

At the other extreme, I learn from Sam Freedman’s epic 8.5k word Olympic preview that we also have a guy who is 50 on the skateboarding team. I hope they find somewhere he can enjoy a nice cup of tea, a delicious French pastry, and a quiet sit down.

…Or Your Uneven Bars

Once again, this newsletter is too long. Suffice to say, that when I was seven, I watched the Olympics just for the sparkly leotards. I suspect the girls will be similar. 

I’m about as flexible as a chest freezer, but the gymnastics is just extremely watchable and there’s two whole weeks of tumbling/bars/somersaults. “Artistic gymnastics” is all the classic stuff, vaults and pommel horses and the like, while “Rhythmic gymnastics” is the one with Barbie vibes where they have the ribbons and balls and hoops and even sparklier leotards. It seems there’s also a third category now, “trampoline”. Let’s just say I will NOT be showing that to the twins, and the whole of the O2 Oxygen Trampoline park can thank me later in the summer holidays.

See you next week to discuss my ultimate sports crush ;)

But what happens when there is too much cuteness? Where does the sparkle rainbow heart glitter princess magic go when every item has been turned into an ice-cream with sprinkles on it? For those of you at the back shouting 👏GABBY’S👏DOLL👏HOUSE👏 – I hear you, but there’s actually some pretty solid writing underpinning Gabby and her cats. Plus, it teaches a shedload of pattern recognition stuff which is actually going to be really helpful in the coding-filled job market of the 2040s. So we will discuss the Gabster and her cathouse (for that is what it is, when you think about it) another time. 

Block Rocking Beats

Instead, buckle up my friends, for today we venture back into the world of…. IMC Toys. Last week, we talked about Cry Babies: Magic Tears, a show so bad it led to this household’s first use of the Netflix block button. 

If you haven’t discovered the joys of the Netflix block button yet, welcome. The full instructions are here but once you’re in to the “settings” bit on your TV it’s pretty self-explanatory. It's brilliant, because once something’s blocked, it never appears in the choosing carousel – so you can just say that it’s gone as part of the natural Netflix cycle, which giveth and taketh away various series of Paw Patrol (and RuPaul’s Drag Race for the grown-ups, boo). I very occasionally hear the odd passing lament for CB:MT… but I have never had to watch it again.

Tom, who edits this newsletter (as well as writing awesome books), has gone above and beyond his remit and spotted this excellent advisory Netflix block list on BlueSky. People have also mentioned Dinotrux and Blippi as worthy recipients of the parental banhammer, so I pass that on without having seen them myself firsthand in the spirit of helpfulness. 

God, I love a block button. Did you know Spotify has one too? But (this is crazy) you can’t go back and see who you’ve blocked or set your preferences upfront, you just have to do it on the fly. So if (e.g.) Lily Allen or George Ezra come on, click on the three dots above the song, choose “View artist,” click the three dots again, and click “Don’t play this artist”. Voila, you never have to listen to either of them ever again. Bliss. On Twitter, the “mute” button is better than “block” because you can selectively unmute the annoying person if they’re in the middle of an interesting conversation, AND they can’t see they’re blocked, thus minimising drama all round.

B*tch(es), Please

Alright Frances, I hear you say, if you’re so good with the block button how did you end up watching the entirety of another IMC Toys show? And that is a very valid question. Streaming platforms are fickle things. Once I'd deployed the Netflix block button, I thought I was safe, but it turns out we still had Amazon Prime. This was a hangover from the newborn “oh I didn’t know babies needed this essential thing, how can a new one arrive later today” era, so I went to check out the streaming service that is also part of Bezos’ all-day delivery empire. Big mistake!!! In the three seconds it took to load the landing page, a tiny voice piped up: “mummy, what's that cute puppy thing?”

By the time I'd clicked on VIP Pets, it was too late.

We are the VIP Pets! The coolest pets with a passion for hair! We are best friends and together we will discover lots of beautiful hairstyles and go on exciting adventures!

Imagine these mind-numbing words delivered at breakneck speed. If the voice acting in Cry Babies: Magic Tears sounds like the world's most vapid Valley girls on valium, VIP Pets features the voice talents of some women who went to the doctor in the 1960s and said they needed to lose a bit of weight and do the housework faster. These dogs (and, in later series, cats) cannot talk fast enough… yet they have nothing to say.

Taylor, Gwen, Juliet, Nyla, Tiffany, Lilith, Alexia and Lady Gigi (yes of course I had to Google their names) are coiffured, doe-eyed, over-accessorised pooches who frequent Fabio & Fabia's hair salon. Fabio is a walking stereotype of a hairdresser, and Fabia is his niece. The dogs communicate by smartphone, aim to become influ-pets (why not “petfluencers” kjdkdjsdkjasdk) and the screen is liberally peppered with emojis, reaction stickers and the visual clutter beloved of tween girls. 

I couldn’t tell you which dog is which, but there's definitely a hippy yoga one, a sporty one, and one who likes “trap music.” Every episode involves a lengthy transformation sequence where a shallow, image-obsessed dog goes down a helter-skelter slide to have yet more make-up, hair dye and glittery accessories heaped upon her. 

Swiftian, Sort Of

The Kennel Club is worried about health issues affecting flat-nosed dogs, but it doesn’t specifically mention excessive use of hair straighteners and glitter eyeshadow. I'm worried about the future of the human race, because if I was an alien who saw VIP Pets from space, I would not hesitate for one nanosecond before nuking this whole planet to kingdom come.

Are there any redeeming features? Well, it’s better than Cry Babies, because you can watch it as a sort of Hogarthian satire of influencer culture. The pups sometimes work through some friendship squabbles, usually with some listening and saying sorry, which is good to learn about.

There’s also an argument to be made along the same lines as the last three million Taylor Swift think pieces: that TS’s music is incredibly relatable for women and girls, her concerts bring people together with friendship bracelets etc., and it doesn’t really matter what men think, because it’s not aimed at them. In the same way, the animals’ aim to become influ-pets, master skateboarding or learn to paint is not aimed at impressing some dog. It’s purely for their own amusement. But “their own amusement” is just…. more makeovers.

This is longer than a candy-coloured, triple-plait, VIP Pet music festival special hair extension now – but with the summer holidays approaching, we should talk about what to watch, not just things to avoid… so next week we’ll return to more paw-sitive territory.