Watch With Father #3: Bing
“Round the corner, not far away / Bing is [Insert Subject Here] today.” So begins – give or take a subject – every episode of Bing, in which an animated three-year-old bunny encounters and learns to overcome the challenges of toddler life.
Bing‘s five-minute episodes have a pretty standard formula. Bing is doing something that makes him happy; something goes wrong; Bing is upset, or scared, or angry, or some such thing; but the gentle guidance of Flop helps Bing come to with things, and all is well again. Then Bing recaps the story to end the show. (Who’s Flop? We’ll come back to Flop.) All scenarios are completely realistic – Bing is scared of fireworks, Bing accidentally breaks Flop’s phone, Bing isn’t patient enough to be quiet so that he can feed the ducks properly. That sort of thing.
Watch With Father #2: Waybuloo
To a grown-up viewer who may still be reeling from first contact with In The Night Garden, Waybuloo looks comfortingly normal at first glance. A gentle theme tune plays as the camera pans over the magic land of Nara while the Piplings – four smiling elfin thingies – fly happily around. After that, most episodes open with one of the Piplings bouncing happily onto the screen and talking – with words, actual words! – to set up the hook for this episode. Somebody has found an interesting cave, or wants to draw a bird, or something.
And then, almost immediately, the story is put on hold because a machine made of crystals and pan pipes summons everyone to participate in a yoga demonstration.
Watch With Father #1: In The Night Garden
As a new parent paying serious attention to CBeebies for the first time, you may well find yourself starting with In The Night Garden. Not only is it a global success, but it’s aimed at the very youngest of children.
Your initial reaction is likely to be horror at the prospect of watching this on a regular basis. Here is the plot of a fairly typical episode of In The Night Garden: Makka Pakka washes the faces of the Pontipines, who are small, followed by the faces of the Haahoos, who are big. Here is the plot of another fairly typical episode of In The Night Garden: The Tombliboos’ trousers fall down a lot. The Tombliboos love their Tombliboo trousers. Isn’t that a pip?
Watch With Father, Prologue: Camberwick Green
On Monday 3 April 1978, when I was three, the BBC began once again to repeat Camberwick Green, the everyday tale of stop-motion folk. The chances are good that I was watching.
For one thing, if you wanted to watch pre-school TV in Britain in the late 70s – or, for that matter, if you wanted to put your child in front it – then your options were pretty limited. There were only three channels. And there were no video recorders. (Well, there were, but you probably didn’t have one.) So if you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it live.
