CBeebies Radio

Remit or no, them kids is well scary! They sound like androids, or as though the presenter is rushing around like Roger Ruskin Spear (if you have to ask...) turning tape recorders hidden inside giant papier mache heads on and off in to synchronise with the presenter's questions. And they're obsessed with dancing. They give me nightmares - why not get an Edward de Souza soundalike to introduce the programme and have done with it - or failing that, Nick Ross.

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"It's two o'clock and time for The Village of the Damned (formerly CBeebies)."

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I have, through more or less legitimate means, sneaked a look at an actual CBeebies script. As far as I can work out, the children are on various CDs to be punched in, or whatever the term is, like jingles on the Jimmy Young show. This explains the "animatronic" vibe. Why not have the adults recorded and the children live in the studio? Messier, no doubt, but at least it might sound like they were alive.

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Not the "coolest" of references, perhaps, but this "disc jockey", as they are called, used to play "gramophone records" and recite recipes when given the Pavlovian cue by a high-voiced pixie who, almost certainly, existed only on tape - hence my association with the android children of faerie on the CBeebies programme. Or prog, as JY would have said. Oh, and he once interviewed a relative of mine who was the world's leading tegestologist. (Wonder if that word will be enough to have this post referred upwards?)

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Somnolence is the optimum state for appreciating CBeebies - at any age.

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Hey, maybe it's like the "Toddlers' Truce" of early children's television in reverse. Find more details here if you have a mind:

www.transdiffusion.o...

But the key point is that after children's programmes in the very early days of TV the BBC (only one channel, and no ITV) would go off air so that parents could hustle the kiddies off to bed.

So perhaps CBeebies isn't designed for the entertainment of children - a notion which always seemed a little far-fetched, after all - and is expressly intended to encourage adults to switch off their sets in order to reduce awareness of just how frequent the repeats are. Or to do something more worthwhile. Or something.