“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.

In that sense, Bing is – deliberately – a very grounded show indeed.  Yes, Bing is a rabbit, and all his fellow toddlers are animals too.  But so far, so genre-conventional; “proper” animals show up occasionally as well.  And their world is plainly a human city, with houses, cars, shops, a park, and so forth.  It’s a stylised city, and beautifully so, with jazzy incidental music, curvy houses, and bright colours.  But it’s still the world outside your window.  All episodes take place in real time, and the children sometimes talk over one another.  In that sense, it’s fundamentally a real-world kind of show.

Except for one thing.  All the kids are accompanied by a little talking doll-type figure.  In Bing’s case, that’s Flop, but the others have one too.  Visually, Flop is clearly a toy – he has a knitted texture, he has a seam down the side.

But he doesn’t act like a toy, and he’s not treated as a toy.  The show is intentionally vague about what Flop actually is.  Bing and the other children always refer to their companions by name, which sidesteps having to directly spell out what the relationship is.  Official publicity material calls them “carers”, and ultimately, there’s no room for doubt that they’re being written as the responsible adults.  While Flop appears to be a full-time carer, one of them runs the shop at the end of the road, and another can be seen driving off to work in the opening credits.  If the plot calls for some other random adult to show up, they’re depicted in the same style as Flop.  If the kids are on a play date, the dolls tend to leave the kids to it and wander off for a nice cup of tea in peace and quiet.

On the other hand, it’s kind of odd if they’re literally the parents, because, well, they’re a fraction of their charges’ size, and they’re made of wool.  And interestingly, they all seem to be solo acts; there is never any suggestion of anyone having two carers.  The implication seems to be more that in the world of Bing, Flop and his kin exist instead of parents.  (Do not think about what happens to the kids when they grow up.  That line of thought strays beyond the boundaries of the show.  That way lies madness.)

This conceit is a stroke of genius, because visually, it completely recasts the father/son relationship which is at the heart of the show.  Precisely why the parent figures are all dolls is left ambiguously open to interpretation.  One reading is that it’s the world from a toddler’s rather self-centred perspective.  Another is that Flop is the ultimate unthreatening parent figure; he can cajole, charm, and offer wisdom, but ultimately his ability to control Bing stems solely from his ability to command Bing’s respect.  It also poses an interesting challenge for the animators, which is worth looking out for on its own – sets have to be scaled for Bing, but adult things have to be usable for Flop.  That leads to some oddly proportioned props which the designers have rather brilliantly managed to blend seamlessly into the vibe.

Which is interesting, because Bing is adapted from a series of books by Ted Dewan, which take a different tack altogether.  Like the TV show, the Bing books generally feature Bing attempting some activity or other – music, dressing, making something – with Flop in tow.  Like the TV show, something will go wrong.  Like the TV show, Flop will offer a suggestion that sets things right.  Like the TV show, it’s all colourful and stylised.

Unlike the TV show, only Flop and Bing are seen.  And unlike the TV show, Flop’s pretty clearly a toy.  Sometimes this is ambiguous (and it’s now complicated by the fact that there’s now at least one book which is a back-adaptation of a TV episodes), but the books include scenes that clearly show Bing sleeping with Flop in his bed, and one of them is entirely about Flop helping Bing to make a present for a mysterious, unseen “Daddy”.

So that’s why Flop looks like a doll in the TV series.  And the books are pretty good, in point of fact – their more stylised art hangs in there in the show in the closing segments where Bing recaps the plot – but it’s the recasting of Flop as a parent figure that really makes the show work.

The voice casting is well judged too.  Wisely, they’ve taken the common modern approach of getting an actual child to do Bing (Elliot Kerley, who was nine at the time).  He’s good.  More surprising is the casting as Flop of Mark Rylance, who was also seen this year playing Cromwell in Wolf Hall.  Rylance is in his mid fifties, and pitches it as the voice of older wisdom, pushing Flop somewhere further into a vague territory between father, grandfather, and miscellaneous mentor.

Children’s television, especially for very young children, has two audiences – the kids who are its official viewership, and the accompanying adults who can be assumed to be in the room too.  The traditional way of entertaining both audiences is to throw in some gags for the adults.  Bing takes a different approach.  Broadly, it’s trying to do vignettes of recognisable situations which both parents and toddlers will respond to.  The toddlers see a show about a small child learning to overcome problems.  The adults see a show about teaching a toddler to overcome problems – for us, it’s essentially a show in which Flop tacitly dispenses parenting tips.

Because the parent/child relationship is at the heart of the show, Bing gets away with riding both horses like this.  It’s not an especially funny show – it’s not meant to be – but its design sense and clever central gimmick  give it a lot of appeal, perhaps not to adults generally, but certainly to the parents of the very young.  Who, after all, are the adults who are going to see it.

Next time: Kerwhizz.