This is a very off-piste blog, but it’s about something that really piste me off (geddit?). There doesn’t seem to be much about it elsewhere on the internet, so I’ll put my thoughts here for any sleep-deprived parents of young children who find themselves thinking, “What the hell?!” If that’s you and Google has led you here, then trust me, you’re not the only one. My daughter is five now, so she’s moved on from most of the TV programmes she liked two or three years ago. I’m genuinely quite sad about some of them, such as Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom and Bluey, but one that I don’t miss at all is Bing. For those without kids, Bing is an animated show aimed at toddlers and pre-schoolers. Its hero is Bing Bunny, who wears red dungarees, eats carroty bagels, and is always learning a relatable lesson about the world around him. He and his friends, Sula and Pando, are also a lot bigger than their grown-up carers, who are little sort-of sackcloth things. Bing’s little sort-of sackcloth thing is called Flop (sometimes voiced by David Threlfall and other times by Mark Rylance). Bing and The Art of Zen The reasons I’ve seen put forward for why Bing and the other young characters are so much larger than the grown-ups are by turns funny, deep, and disturbing. One suggestion is that it represents how very young children naturally see themselves as the centre of the world. Another is that the entire show is Bing’s fever dream after all the grown-ups in his world were wiped out by “The Virus”. Whatever the rationale, many parents (real ones, not sackcloth ones) loathe both the show and Bing himself. I will, however, defend Bing as a character because, a lot of the time, he can only react to all the stuff going wrong around him, from broken-down buses ruining trips to the seaside to ice-creams falling on the floor. If anything, I think his character has quite a profound, Buddhist-like message for young minds: life is unfair and full of pain and suffering at every level. The best way through is to accept, adapt, and find what joy you can. However, there are two episodes of Bing that infuriate me to the point of speaking heatedly at the telly (shouting would’ve scared my daughter), turning the episode off, or having to leave the room. In all cases, I’ve also had to explain to my daughter that the moral message of the episode in question is utter nonsense and that she is never to accept anyone treating her the way Bing is being treated. Swing The first is the infamous “Swing” episode, which has been the subject of at least one ranty thread on Mumsnet. In this episode, Bing is at the playground, and Flop is pushing him on the swing. His friend Pando (a panda bear who runs around in his nappy) and Pando’s grown-up, Padget, turn up. Pando wants a go on the swing, so Flop suggests to Bing that he and Pando take turns, ten swings each. Bing is unsure but agrees and gets off. Once Pando is on the swing, he refuses to count properly, pretending that he’s lost his place and starting over. Bing starts getting frustrated, but Padget, who is pushing Pando, just laughs about it and half-heartedly asks Pando to count properly, whilst continuing to swing him. Pando almost reaches ten and then starts counting in halves, laughing as he does so. Eventually, Bing understandably loses his cool and rushes towards Pando, yelling “Ten! Say ten!” Pando swings into him and knocks him over. Now, it’s suggested that Pando has some kind of challenging behavioural issue, which is good and fine, so I stress that my issue is not with him but at the sackcloth adults who enable his behaviour. They don’t hold him accountable for not counting properly, oh no. They don’t say anything to him, in fact. They both start asking Bing why he ran in front of the swing! Talk about gaslighting! I haven’t seen the episode now for at least 18 months, but even at this distance, I can feel my blood pressure rising. Bing did as he was told; Pando didn’t play fair and wound him up. Yet Bing is the one who gets physically hurt and takes 100% of the blame for what happened. Whether Pando has extra needs or not, he is not held accountable in the slightest. The behaviour of the grown-ups in this situation is appalling, as is the message that if you stand up for yourself when someone’s abusing your trust and good faith, then you’re the one with questions to answer. Mine Another episode, however, goes even further over the line. As the father of a young girl, its "lesson" has the potential to be downright disturbing. Pando is at Bing’s house, and they’re playing hide-and-seek. It turns out that Pando, tired from whatever they’d done earlier in the day, has fallen asleep in Bing’s bed. Bing, understandably, wants Pando to wake up and get the hell out of his bed, but Flop starts shushing him and asking him how he’d feel if someone woke him up! The solution that Bing is eventually made to go along with is to have an impromptu sleepover, with the poor bunny relegated to sleeping top-and-tail—at the wrong end of his own bed. Excuse the keyboard warrior caps lock swearing on a post about kids' TV, but WHAT THE FUCK?! Every time this episode came on, I had to reiterate to my daughter, as strongly as possible, that it is not okay for someone to get into her bed and fall asleep without her permission. She has every right, every right, to wake them up and tell them to get out. No questions, no context. Get up, and get out. What moral message Helen Farrall, Lucy Murphy, Mikael Shields, the writers of this particular episode, were trying to convey is beyond me. I shouldn’t have had to sit there, usually at 7 am, making sure my daughter understood that it’s okay to stand up for herself and that she gets to decide what happens in something as private and personal as her own bed. I’ll stop there because, as you can possibly tell, I’m now a bit worked up and could do with a lie-down—as long as a random friend hasn’t fallen asleep in my bed. Wouldn't want to disturb them now, would I?
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AuthorI'm a writer and editor from Birmingham. Nothing fancy about that! Archives
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