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Last full day of the holiday and it’s been an utter delight to immerse myself in my family and forget about all that needs to be done over the next couple of months (only moving house and writing a new stand up show - pretty easy stuff by the standards of 2017 so far).
Up early this morning with Phoebe and we watched some Netflix to pass the time. I’ve been quite enjoying watching Peppa Pig on a continuous loop. It’s got some funny jokes in it and I identify with Daddy Pig. It’s like someone took my life and put it up on screen. But today Phoebe insisted on watching the frankly confusing Mother Goose Club. I have no idea what this is meant to be or where it originated - was it a TV show first or is it just an internet phenomenon. The first “episode†features loads of American kids (along with the occasional American teenager and adult) dressed in cartoonish and cheap costumes, singing nursery rhymes with huge smiles fixed to their faces like they are being forced to do this by unseen terrorists and if their enthusiasm dips for just a second then their families will be murdered. The second episode is all cartoons, some of them seemingly featuring the characters we saw in the first collection, but now as animated characters. And then the next episode features different kids, no longer in costume, doing more nursery rhymes (and like the now Shakespeare-like Little Baby Bum, leaning heavily on “The Wheels on the Busâ€. There seems to be little continuity or connection. Perhaps the original cast were deemed too morose and were murdered. It’s so bamboozling that it might actually be the greatest art ever created. I thought Phoebe had good taste and have really enjoyed watching many of the things she likes (Monsters Inc for example bears repeated viewings, which is fortunate, because that’s what we’re getting), but this stuff is terrible and yet she’s fascinated by it.
The low point though came with t
his vignette, predictably centred around WOTB (as the cool kids call it), but inexplicably now featuring a Minion from Despicable Me. I think this might be the worst thing ever committed to film. The rest of Mother Goose Club has no recognisable characters from other stuff and doesn’t have the production values to suggest it would be affiliated with the DM franchise and there seems no discernible reason why the producers would break their winning formula of awful child actors badly singing songs and pay for the rights to this presumably quite expensive character. Maybe they just had the costume and thought fuck it, who’s going to find out?
But if that wasn’t enough they seem to have pushed two kids with no performance experience on to the set with the barest of instructions to teach the Minion how to sing Wheels on the Bus and to do the choreography themselves, whilst a completely unconnected piece of music plays loudly in the background. I don’t know what I am looking at, but it’s worse than a car crash. It has been viewed over 40 million times on Youtube alone. Why?
But I just put it on again with Phoebe sitting beside me and she loved it. Perhaps this is just how life looks to a toddler - a load of unconnected things all happening at once. But surely Hell is just this video repeated endlessly with you Clockwork Oranged and unable to ever look away.
