Eh oh

This'll make a change from all the religion and politics...

Last week I heard Simon Mayo interviewing Andrew Davenport, the creative genius behind those contemporary classics of children's television Teletubbies and In The Night Garden, who has finally begun to emerge from behind his puppets and receive some of the recognition he deserves (it was the second BBC interview with him I’d heard in the past month).

Davenport’s creations hold a special place in the hearts of anyone who was a young child (or a parent of young children) in Britain in the Nineties or early Noughties. Our own children were born in the mid-Nineties, so for them (and us) Andrew will always be, first and foremost, the voice of Tiny from Tots TV. And the question I’d ask him if I was conducting the interview would be: how on earth did someone with such a deeply resonant voice achieve the high-pitched tones of that anarchic green-haired puppet?

Everyone now associates Davenport with Teletubbies, not surprisingly since it was the first of his creations for Ragdoll to gain international recognition. (On a serious note for a moment: John Bayley informs us that, once her dementia set in, Teletubbies was the only TV programme that gave Iris Murdoch any pleasure.) But Tiny and Tom, with their echoes of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers (with the French-speaking Tilly their Margaret Dumont?), are surely one of the great comic partnerships. And for all the simple, wordless brilliance of Davenport's later productions, it's a shame he no longer has the scope to deploy the knockabout verbal wit he showed in the scripts for some of those earlier shows. If you don't believe me (and you've got a few minutes to spare) take a look at this clip, but make sure you watch it through to the end:

Our shelves also contain dusty, worn-out VHS tapes of some of Davenport’s other early programmes, such as Brum and Rosie and Jim. What's more, living as we did in the Midlands when our children were young, we made frequent trips to the Ragdoll shop (sadly, no longer there) in Stratford-on-Avon. Once, we even saw the actual Rosie and Jim barge tied up on the river outside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Now here’s my bid for Pseuds' Corner. If Tots TV - full of eccentric wit, but retaining a conventional narrative structure and recognisable characters - was Andrew Davenport's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then maybe the more symbolic and mythopoeic Teletubbies is his Ulysses, and In the Night Garden, with its dreamy, half-conscious associative technique, his Finnegan's Wake. Or maybe Teletubbies is Davenport's Waste Land and In the Night Garden his Four Quartets?

I should stop now...

Camping it up

I've got a lot of time for Richard Dawkins, but every once in a while he comes up with a rather silly idea. One example was his suggestion that non-believers should describe themselves as 'Brights' (oh dear). Now he's organised an atheist summer camp, apparently to rival the 'faith camps' to which the children of religiously-minded parents are shipped off every year. The idea is a mistake on so many levels. Firstly, it contradicts Dawkins' own nostrum that imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse: is instruction in atheism any different, and do you really think any children are going to sign up for this without parental prompting? Secondly, spending your summer doing philosophy is going to sound pretty naff to all but the geekiest kids.

But most of all, the idea is wrong because it's another instance of atheists and secularists apeing the religious, and trying to get a piece of their action, rather than doing their own thing. Other examples of this include humanists campaigning for a slot on Thought for the Day (as if any philosophy worth its salt could be summed up in a trite five-minute sermon) and (going back in history a bit) nineteenth-century radicals setting up 'Socialist Sunday Schools'. It plays into the hand of those who characterise atheism as just another 'faith', with its own received dogmas and fundamentalist adherents.

Instead of consigning their offspring to a spell of godless indoctrination during the holidays, why don't atheist (or secularist, or humanist) parents simply take them along to art galleries, museums and concerts, or to the beach, or the countryside, to show them the (natural and human) world in all its glory - and to demonstrate that you don't need a faith, or even a substitute anti-faith, to find life meaningful and worthwhile.

Still, at least Dawkins' atheist camp is infinitely healthier than what's on offer for Gazan children this summer:

Children in Hamas summer camps reenacted the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in the presence of top Hamas officials, according to pictues obtained by The Jerusalem Post.

According to Israeli defense officials, more than 120,000 Palestinian children are spending the summer in Hamas-run camps. In addition to religious studies, the children undergo semi-military training with toy guns.

At a recent summer camp graduation ceremony, the children put on a show reenacting the June 2006 abduction of Schalit.

Now that really is child abuse.

(Via The Contentious Centrist)