Tuesday 4 November 2014

In The Nightmare Garden

Words cannot express just how much I hate..

The tombiliboos - or however the heck you spell it. I hate them, I truly and deeply hate them and the silly little blobs on their heads. I hate their silly trousers that always fall down - just buy belts you silly little blob people!
I hate In The Night Garden. It's just about the worst program on CBeebies at the moment. It's so teeth gratingly awful I don't know why anyone watches it ever, except that Joseph has started to.
It's my fault. I taught him how to select the programs he wanted from CBeebies iPlayer as I was usually too busy with feeding Daniel to get up. At first all this meant was lots and lots of Octonauts, which was bearable if a little repetitive at times. I know a lot about fiddler crabs now.
The issue was that he soon worked out how to do more than choose the next program in the series, he could see other things he liked the look of....

Oh my son. You used to have such good taste in telly. If it wasn't Aardman, he just wasn't interested. He loved Timmy Time and Shaun the Sheep and as for Wallace and Gromit - well one lunch time he told me "Cracking toast, Mummy!" and wanted to know if we could build a rocket under the house. Alas we have no basement.

I should explain that we do not have "proper" telly in our house. We have, instead, a good quality Internet connection which gives us access to most freeview stuff anyway and we also pay for Netflix which supplies Joseph with enough Disney films to keep him happy as well as Thomas the Tank Engine. We used BBC iPlayer every now and then for something that looked good and bought some DVDs of the stuff he really liked thus ensuring that the BBC did get some money from us in the end.
Now I have to hide the mouse if we watch iPlayer. I can cope with the odd episode of Tree Fu Tom, which is pretty bad and even Nina and the Neurons which is a bit educational but it all went to pot on holiday.
If he was good he got a bit in the morning and the CBeebies bedtime hour at the end of the day. We were subjected to Abney and Teal - I hate this show too but it was only one episode at a time - and the true dire hell that is In The Night Garden. I'm not going to pay a licence fee if they're going to waste it on that bilge water! That's when he saw it for the first time and fell for its heroin like addictiveness.
I feel sorry for Upsy Daisy I have to admit, forced to dance for the evil Iggle Piggle and his creepy blanket. She must dance with him and keep a smile on her poor face..... As for the Macca Pacca, that poor chap needs a therapist for his obsessive behaviour before it gets totally out of hand.
It's the tombliboos I really hate. They are the evil masterminds of the whole creepy place. I hate they way they make poor Derek Jacobi narrate it. What did the poor man do to deserve such a punishment? I imagine him in tears after each reading whimpering "I used to do Shakespeare you know!"
I hate the insidious theme music that sticks in the brain like glue and is harder to remove than a migraine, also leaving you feeling nauseous and emotional. It sits in the back of your brain quietly and creeps on out when you least expect it, when you're doing the shopping for example and you find yourself humming the sanity rotting ditty and it just wont stop! You want to scream and rip your own ears off, but in the middle of Sainsburys you look a bit odd.
I really and truly hate how they make the wretched thing last half an hour.