"H" is for "Healthy"?
28th January, 2008
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Remember Slimey the worm? He and Fluffy the elephant lived in Oscar's trash can and helped him be a grouch. Big Bird and his friend Mr Snuffleupagus, who no-one else ever saw, would stroll up Sesame Street past the trash can and Oscar and his pets would hurl abuse.
They don't do that these days because: (1) no-one hurls insults on children's television anymore; (2) Mr Snuffleupagus has been seen on numerous occasions; and (3) Slimey and Fluffy seem to have joined the ranks of the pitifully nice and boring. Sesame Street, like the rest of the world, has fallen foul of some overprotective urge that seems to have taken over the middle classes. Snuffy, who from 1971 to 1985 was perfectly happy being seen by no-one except Big Bird, was eventually forced to come out of his nest because - according to long-running suspicion confirmed in a TV interview with the actor inside Snuffy's hairy suit - producers were worried that as the show's adults didn't believe Big Bird's stories about his friend, kids might also come to think that their tales of paedophiles and other lurking abuse would be dismissed by parents and carers. More recently the Cookie Monster was forced to change the habit of a lifetime and announce that cookies should henceforth be a "sometimes food". Sheesh! What sort of fathead thinks a blue monster keen on healthy eating can have half the attraction of a ravenous glutton who ate everything from telephones to tablecloths and was even known to cast an appraising eye over other Muppets? The new-age niceness of Oscar and the radical dietary shift of the Cookie Monster are symptomatic not of political correctness, but of unnecessary middle-class mollycoddling. Even The Count no longer looks much like a vampire. Witness the long queues of oversized cars outside your local school; listen to a couple of parents share their angst about food additives; observe the pressure whole families are under to attend the most obscure children's sport session. Forgotten are the facts that most foods are made to be eaten, kids can walk to and from school and that they are capable of kicking a football around without the need of loud encouragement or applause. I blame the sorts of people who buy four-wheel-drives that need reversing cameras. Those things symbolise the desire of certain parents to hive off their little poppets from the world, to manage every minute of childhood and adolescence, to never allow them to take a knock or witness anything unpleasant. Or, put another way, to teach them that the world is bad and that they are somehow either not part of it all, or so much a superior part that they should not risk getting involved. The concept of getting in and mucking down with the rest of society - of struggling and dealing with the less attractive aspects of the world in which we live - is not to be countenanced. Kids do have a sense of humour, they do like to be scared and they are usually capable of distinguishing vaudeville from reality. That squeaky-voiced red creature named Elmo, who's scared of the world, never ventures far from adult supervision and appears to exist in order to teach children about the importance of marketing and consumerism, is not funny. Elmo is a disgrace to Sesame Street. Let Smiley's star shine again. |
