I am being paid to watch kids’ TV and it’s complete madness
It’s now 6 am, and I am at work in a live TV broadcast studio at the end of a night shift doing kids’ TV. There is something wrong with the way my life is going. Working in TV as a freelancer is a bizarre way to make a living. You each work in a pod that is broadcasting a selection of similar channels to millions of viewers. I’m in the kids’ shows pod and over the past 12 hours, I have watched a lot of kids’ programmes, and the vast majority have been a bit odd.
Pokémon’s premise is weird and horrible
Take Pokemon for example. I think they are in a parallel dimension, as there are strange creatures everywhere, and no one is freaking out. The premise is that people can catch these bizarre creatures in magic balls, and they then make these animals fight each other until they are unconscious – like surreal dogfighting without all the blood and tattooed men.
Lazytown is a prime example of insane kids’ TV fodder
Another example of unquestioned oddness is called ‘Lazytown’. This seems to exist in a strange town in the middle of nowhere that is populated by a few rubbery puppets, a sport-obsessed voyeur who lives in an airship, a man with a unique face who lives underground, and a young girl who has apparently turned up from nowhere and has no family or people concerned with her whereabouts. Maybe it’s supposed to be an unrealistic purgatory or something.
Each week, the underground man puts on a cunning disguise, like a moustache or elaborate hat, and he places the town in peril. The sports fellow then saves the day using tennis balls, a golf club, ping pong balls, or something stupid. Then they all burst into synchronised dancing to Euro-techno. Who thinks this shit up, and how do they manage to get paid doing it?
Handy Manny and Tigger and Pooh are slightly normal
Later, we have ‘Handy Manny’ – a man who lives in a semi-Mexican town who has tools that talk and move and do all the work while he gets all the credit. Which is fairly sane for kids’ TV. ‘My friends Tigger and Pooh’ – the Pooh bear tales essentially, but with 3d graphics and a girl instead of Christopher Robin (who may or may not have been eaten by Tigger, it remains unclear).
Finally, there is the trip-fest that is Teletubbies, followed by In The Night Garden
For even younger kids, there is, of course, ‘Teletubbies’. Unless you have kids, you will likely know of its existence but won’t have seen it. I suggest you watch it just once. On drugs, if it is legal where you are – otherwise it is immoral apparently. Anyway, the teletubbies live on a hill with rabbits in hobbit holes and have a disembodied baby’s head as the sun. They have TVs built into their bodies and stem from a time when cathode ray tube televisions were still popular, so it must have constituted a big chunk of their body mass. It’s not right.
‘In the Night Garden’ is similarly mind-altering, but I have never actually watched it. As far as I can tell, there are weird woodland creatures, a tiny kingdom for some reason, and the occasional UFO.
Working in TV is odd
Now imagine all the above for 12 hours throughout the night, while you are suffering from sleep deprivation, and that is the night shift. Of course, people who are parents have seen all these shows a thousand times and are immune to them. Maybe I’m just not sleep-deprived enough.
To cap the weirdness off, the guy in the next TV pod is being paid to watch a soft porn channels which – trust me – is harder and more depressing to watch than kids’ TV. ‘Emmanuelle in space’ is the current offering. It’s as good as it sounds.
