On oochie coo.

It was while you were watching some soppy reality TV zoo documentary programmy whatsit about a month after the Star was born that you finally realised that something was very very wrong.

There were lions. There were penguins. There were lizards. There were elephants. There were meercats. There were polar bears. There were ostriches. There were rhinos. There were baby rhinos.

There were baby rhinos!

There were BABY RHINOS!!

There were BABY RHINOS!!!

Look at the CUTE BABY RHINOS!!!!

The baby rhinos exited the screen stage right and you shook yourself and went and made a cup of tea in order to calm down.

After all baby rhinos really are quite sweet. Responses like that are perfectly natural. Perfectly natural. Everybody lactates at the sight of baby rhinos, don’t they?

But when you came back, there were some scrawny newly hatched pelicans flopping around on screen, looking positively revolting.

And something inside you still said: Baby birds. Baby birds! BABY BIRDS!! BABY BIRDS!!! Look at the CUTE BABY BIRDS!!!!

At which point you decided you can take this bonding business too far and have been avoiding kittens, Monsters Inc, anything fluffy and pink, and ‘baby in peril’ stories ever since.

Particularly ‘baby in peril’ stories. You had actual screaming nightmares after Weekend Breakfast played you an emergency phone call which included a baby’s dying whimpers in the background. As part of a piece on why there had been so many complaints about it when they played it as part of the regular news.*

So you are not watching Children in Need tonight. What with one thing and another, you’d probably bet the house.

 

*The BBC’s representative said “Well, it would have been different if it had been a video phone of course, but just the sound doesn’t have the same impact.”