On the idiotbox.

Best Friend recently commented that it was time for Mutual Acquaintance to go back to work. She was starting to contemplate which of the CBeebies presenters she fancied.

It hasn’t yet come to that,* but you have started heckling the TV.

You originally only tuned in because the education geek inside you was curious about the way the world was being presented to pre-schoolers and the methods they were using to get their point across.

But the programme makers must be doing something right as the Star, hitherto completely uninterested in the big screen flickering harmlessly on the wall, was hooked from the very beginning of the very first programme.

This is a mixed blessing. You are now able to do the post breakfast washing up and other acts of housework without fear of molestation. But you are also forced to listen to an awful lot of very energetic people warbling enthusiastically away at what you persist in thinking is an ungodly hour for cheerfulness.

There are some shows you like. In the Night Garden is a surprise hit with you.

When Friend of the Family gave the Star a cuddly Iggle Piggle in his first few months you were forced to get rid of it as it gave your nightmares.

In fact, it has all the surrealism that modern fairy tales lack. Whole episodes are given over to the Tombliboos losing their trousers and needing to find them again, taking their trousers off and needing to put them back on again, getting the wrong trousers on and needing to swap them back again, and remembering to take their trousers off at bedtime. This is about as age appropriate as it gets.

If it weren’t for the slightly too knowing voiceover, very reminiscent of Little Britain and surely a nod to the other core audience of layabout students, you would be completely delighted with it.

However, many of the programmes just annoy you.

You thought at first you might like Squiglet and his magic ability to make his drawings come to life. You thoroughly approve of the way he breaks down his sketches into really short simple steps that small children can follow. And he certainly has a less irritating theme tune than the other resident CBeebies artist, Louie.

But he insists on calling his tools by whimsical names and you can’t help yourself.

‘Get your squiggle sticks!’ he says.

‘… crayons…’ Mummy mutters.

‘And your squiggle pads!’

‘… sketch pads.’

‘Let’s get squiggling!’

‘Oh for goodness sake, isn’t DRAWING interesting enough when you are two?’

And then there’s Big Cook Little Cook.

They are the worst offenders in the lets-make-fairy-tales-fluffy stakes, of course, which automatically earns them a black mark. 

Mostly, though, it’s the moment where, every day, they are walking around looking puzzled because they can’t think of what to cook for the story book character who has wandered into their cafe in search of something to eat.

You find yourself with the uncontrollable urge to shout ‘OH. MY. GOD. WHY DO YOU GO THOUGH THIS PANTOMIME EVERY DAY? HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY NOT REMEMBER? GET OUT BIG COOK’S BIG COOKERY BOOK! YOU ALWAYS DO! GO STRAIGHT FOR  THE BOOK! STOP WASTING TIME! GET THE BOOK! GET IT NOW!’

Yes, you are aware the repetition is why the little ones like it. No, it doesn’t seem to help.

You also can’t abide the positively sanctimonious way they go about the clearing up. Bet they put the dishwasher on as soon as the cameras are off you think sourly while sullenly scouring the porridge pan, whose contents every day seem cemented on.

And as for their tag line – ‘We’ll cook for everyone!’ – well, let’s just say you take great pleasure in choosing a new person every day who the BBC probably wouldn’t allow in the cafe, starting with Hitler and getting increasingly tasteless from there.

However, the programme you really can’t abide is Balamory. Which is unfortunate because at the moment it is plum in the middle of your scheduled baby opium** session.

One of your issues with the UK is that Brits are seemingly incapable of interacting in society without iron clad rules, nay, laws even, to govern polite behaviour, but at some point sticking to the rules has become more important than adhering to the intent behind them.

Balamory illustrates this tendency perfectly. 

You feel sure that somewhere in the regulations for children’s TV programmes there is a guideline for the proportion of ethnic minorities to be included in every given show. So despite the fact that Balamory is set on some remote Scottish island there are two main characters out of a very limited cast who are black. Yeah right, you tend to think at this point, what a happy multicultural society we are. Every Scottish island has 40% of its population who are non-white.

You would be more tolerant of this whitewashing of reality if the programme makers hadn’t clearly decided they had now met their right on targets for that week and promptly pissed of for lunch.

As a result, there’s a teacher, a couple of small business owners, and a police officer in Balamory*** but the black people get to play the fitness enthusiast and the painter and decorator. The physical and uneducated roles, ye ken?

It’s surprising really that the resident plumber isn’t Polish and the local corner shop run by someone from the Indian subcontinent, with attendant comedy accents.

But instead, how could we possibly we guess, the local grocer is a wheelchair bound woman, although in a rare moment of sanity, she does have her Mum to do the heavy lifting. But where, you would like to know, is the same sex couple who run the hairdressers? If we are actually being broadminded.

And if anyone thinks you are being overly critical, consider that the most intelligent person on the programme – the eccentric inventor – is, of course, male, white and, just to ensure that the status quo is not really challenged in any way, English. Upper class English, to boot.

However, you could weather the sloppy liberal thinking if it weren’t for the storylines. Which are moral pap, and worse, moral pap you don’t agree with.

A week or so ago they were teaching your child that if guests arrive unexpectedly, it is ok to sit there and prepare to eat a large piece of chocolate cake in front of them without offering them so much as a glass of water. That it is polite, as a guest, to demand that the hostess make a present of something she clearly doesn’t want to and, even worse, to blatantly lie.

Because if that cake was homemade, then you are Delia Smith.

Then there was the time that the community insisted that someone who clearly wasn’t capable of it should organise the village disco, passing over more obvious candidates because if they want it, they should be entitled to have it. Preferably yesterday. And to hell with all that nonsense about needing some talent or, heaven forbid, hard work to become successful****.

But most offensive was the day they spent insisting that one of the characters wasn’t allowed to grieve for the death of a pet.

It’s enough to make you fire up the the Russian satellite.

Unfortunately, the time difference means that the only place showing children’s programmes at that time is the American sponsored fundamentalist Christian brainwashing channel.

You are this close to being forced to fall back on books.

 *But since the topic has been brought up then… Mister Maker. It’s the waistcoat.

**Or ‘babypium’ as Starbucks would doubtles call it.

***And surprise surprise but the police officer is a man and the teacher is a woman. Whodathunkit?

****Or perhaps because the most obvious candidate was black. Uppity…