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BabyFirst

Peek-A-Boo's P-Boo
  • Posted at 11:31am
  • 24 September 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

God knows how I managed to put up with being a toddler in the early 1970s. I was being wheeled about in a pushchair offering minimal safety features compared to today's three-wheeled armoured personnel buggies. I don't think vitamins had been invented – Omega 3 oils certainly hadn't – so rickets and scurvy must have been a constant threat.

And as far as weekday TV entertainment went, there was a 15-minute segment at lunchtime, and 90 minutes in the late afternoon – both sandwiched by insipid programmes on British social history and bleak news updates on the Angolan civil war.

Today we have over 20 channels for kids, and one of them, BabyFirst, is exclusively for toddlers. It offers a rapid succession of mini-programmes across a range of categories – Imagination Lane, Feelings Garden, Sensory Wonderland and Racist Nightclub. No, hang on, that's wrong. Rainbow Dreams, that's it. You can confidently place your child in front of these shows, reasonably certain that they won't portray scenes of wild sexual gymnastics or gruesome eye surgery.

There's Wonderbox, an animated cube which is "full of surprises" – perhaps four tigers or, if you're lucky, three biscuits of varying sizes. There's Bobby's Balloon House, where Bobby bends balloons into unconvincing simulacra of carbon-based life forms. There's Peek-A-Boo, a blue cartoon thing that regularly pops out from behind other cartoon things, and is billed as a "great way of helping you and your child spend quality time together" – although if you need the help of a TV to play peekaboo with your child, you may have some psychosocial issues worth working through.

I've always been intrigued by how children's TV is put together. I imagine the BabyFirst HQ as a smoke-filled room (unlikely since 1 July, I know, but go with me on this), full of stressed people fired up on caffeine and desperately churning out increasingly outlandish material, hoping that some of it might appeal to babies. I can certainly find no better explanation for this bizarre bedtime story.

But as I'm not a toddler, how can I judge whether toddler telly is any good? I've got no idea whether images of a flute having a pillow fight with a viola, or a magic horse producing bunches of grapes at will, is something that's going to help my as-yet unconceived child grapple with life's uncertainties.

And while children undoubtedly go gaga over such cute images (I've seen the effect that Teletubbies has on a three-year old, and it's like hypnosis) you can't help wondering how they're interpreting these surreal sequences.

What's the right age to be introducing the concept of a talking paintbrush? Does a studio performance of The Farmer in the Dell raise more questions than it answers? The farmer takes a wife, the wife takes a child... the nurse takes a cow? The cheese stands alone? Will the notion of a lonely wedge of Edam cause horrific nightmares?

I guess we just have to trust child-rearing experts involved in BabyFirst – while also following their advice not to use the channel as some kind of futuristic 24-hour creche. During the Picture Pad show on Saturday afternoon I watched an adult hand draw a sketch of a mother, father and toddler out having a picnic, and I couldn't help wondering whether there were a few square-eyed toddlers for whom a picnic was as surreal a concept as that flute having a pillow fight with a viola.

BabyFirst is on all the time on Sky channel 624.

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