When TV becomes the babysitter, not only do you lose contact with your children and limit their attention span, increasing the likelihood of ADHD, you are encouraging empires like the BBC to continue wasting your money on ill-conceived formats.
Parents should be ashamed of themselves. And so should the BBC. It’s no wonder this country is bottom of the league tables in terms of literacy when television programmes such as In The Night Garden are being broadcast and encouraged by the evil corporation.
Lazy parents who plonk kids in front of the idiot box have bought into the idea of a bunch of badly realised sponge figures repeating nonsensical phrases as education. Clearly the creators / producers / the BBC have far too much access to LSD or some other mind-altering substances, and their salaries should be cut so they can’t afford the drugs any more.
Parents defend the show by saying how wonderful it is that their N-year-old can sway to the songs and repeat the names of the characters. Just because they like it doesn’t mean it’s good. Surely you should reserve some judgement for yourself on whether what your kids do is good for their development? Oh, wait, except you don’t care do you? That’s why you have TV in the first place isn’t it and let them watch it for hours a day?
The programme is utter shit. It has zero educational value and I’m convinced encourages children to regress or at least mentally under-develop. I’m not saying that things like Bagpuss, Button Moon, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Captain Caveman, etc were shining examples of educational virtue in my day, but at least the tales went somewhere and had some sense of morality. And English words.
A recent example of a good franchise is Peppa Pig: it has morals, values, a storyline and well-realised characters. It’s five minutes of silly, harmless fun that teaches, educates, informs and entertains. Compare that to In the Night Garden, which is 20 minutes of largely incomprehensible repetition that is rotting the mind of two-year-olds countrywide. There’s no contest.
I’m glad we don’t have television in our house. If you let your kids watch ITNG, I fear you are on a self-fulfilling prophecy of becoming the next wave of Government/Daily Mail statistics and deserve everything you get when your kid ends up flipping burgers or stealing from you to fuel their crack habit.
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