My son’s attention span has settled in a bit, and for the first time he’s showing an interest in regular television. His months-long obsession with Baby Shark is well-documented, but that dropped off once he started crawling. What wonder could fish song hold against the golden, imperious thrill of traipsing back and forth between the fireplace and the plant pot 18 times an hour on an eternal quest to place our home’s many and various hazardous materials inside his waiting mouth? Whether dry earth, dusty soot or a Wotsit that’s sat beneath our sofa since the Neolithic, he continues his ravenous travails on a loop for hours, like a chubby, cheerful little wind-up toy.
But now, like people who are into fishing, or speaking Welsh, he has a steady diet of regular programming directed toward his interests. One favourite is Paw Patrol, a blaring, libertarian nightmare in which some gadget-mad puppies are conscripted into a privatised paramilitary unit of first responders. At the behest of a billionaire child king, they pilot rescue crafts for undisclosed fees to the terrified citizens of Adventure Bay. It’s as if Elon Musk bought Port Talbot and took full control of its emergency services.
No such madness compares to the concussed mania of In the Night Garden, my son’s favourite. From Magic Roundabout to the Teletubbies, hacks have lazily implied that children’s TV is reminiscent of drug experiences. Night Garden is different, it’s not on drugs, it is a drug, and one whose soporific qualities are uniquely mystifying.
Ostensibly a dream in the mind of a child, it concerns Iggle Piggle, a monstrous blue entity with a head like a kidney bean whose lopsided mouth appears to have been kicked into his head with a steel-toed boot. He sails each evening to a daylit island garden, meeting a tongue-twisting cadre of acquaintances – Upsy Daisy, Makka Pakka, the Tombliboos, etc – all of whom are forced to enact their tedious microdramas for our amusement. Here, the tombliboos lose their trousers. There, Makka Pakka attaches a sponge to his bicycle. In narrative terms, you’d experience greater dramatic tension by reading a series of WiFi passwords, but it holds my son perfectly enthralled.
After about 20 minutes of these tepid misadventures, the final shot always shows Iggle Piggle sailing home, unconscious, in his boat. He is cast out from this Eden every night because his very form is an affront to God, but this exile can only be enforced once he is asleep, for even the Almighty cannot look such an abomination in the eye.
By this point, of course, my son is very nearly asleep. Cuddling a plush toy Iggle Piggle, he stretches little limbs and dreams himself, of that garden in the night, or of the soft, edible soils of some other, more sensible land.
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