Opinion
Life is dark and absurd. No wonder kids shows celebrating this are winning awards
Cherie Gilmour
Freelance writerMy toddlers adore Teletubbies. As soon as the show’s baby-faced sun-God rises in the sky, they go off like a frog in a sock.
The Teletubbies plod on-stage with their dead eyes, weird noises, and anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner, and I silently categorise the various controversies surrounding them over the years: A televangelist’s accusation of Tinky-Winky’s latent homosexuality, which led to him (Tinky-Winky, not the televangelist) becoming a gay icon; the infamous lion and bear scene which clawed its way out of a surrealist nightmare only to be banned; when they were once described at a World Children’s Summit as “vaguely evil”.
Shows like the Teletubbies, The Ferals, Round the Twist and Lift Off were among the most popular children’s shows throughout the 90s.
Bluey? Meh. My kids can watch it for a few minutes. But the shows that have them transfixed and locked to the screen are weird, absurd, and psychedelic. They’re the kind of shows that could have been cooked up by professional stoners: talking pears, bird-like alien voyeurs, giant blue men who patrol your dreams.
And then I remember all the deeply weird shows I grew up watching in the 1990s: Gogs, Plasmo, Lift Off, Round the Twist, The Ferals, and Mulligrubs. These shows – the ones with a living faceless doll and a drag queen-looking cat who performed in a Madonna-style cone bra – live on vividly in my mind, unlike sanitised kid’s shows like Play School or Blinky Bill.
With the surprise of ‘gateway horror’ show Crazy Fun Park beating Bluey at the Logies for Most Outstanding Children’s Program and Teletubbies getting a Netflix reboot, it’s a timely reminder that we shouldn’t shy away from dark, weird themes in our children’s literary diets.
The Brothers Grimm’s original fairytales are famously brutal; filled with cannibalism, beheadings, abandonment, and the hacking of toes. Many theorists of fairytale psychology, notably Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote The Uses of Enchantment in 1976, argues that terrifying fairytales help kids work through unconscious dilemmas.
Gothic horror writer Neil Gaiman agrees, once saying, “Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses.”
Good stories employ rich symbolism and metaphor to speak to the unconscious. “The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams,” Ursula K Le Guin wrote in her 1975 essay, The Child and the Shadow. They “go straight for the thoughts that go too deep to utter,” which essentially makes the “vaguely evil” Teletubbies on par with Plato.
“Efforts to shield children from perceived unpleasantness, however well-intentioned, ignore the genuine fear and anxiety that kids must grapple with in their daily lives,” Kathy Ishizuka wrote, a point that became starkly apparent during the COVID pandemic.
In 2022, the Australian Psychological Society found a “shocking increase in mental illness” in children under the age of 18, including a 45 per cent increase in social anxiety disorder cases over two years. There can be little doubt that our children suffered through COVID lockdowns. And while our instinct may be to protect them even more, we are doing them a disservice in doing so.
Crazy Fun Park was a surprise winner at the Logies, beating out Bluey for Most Oustanding Childen’s ProgramCredit: ABC
Using absurdity, fear and weirdness can inoculate kids from a Disney-fied “happily ever after” view of life. In a world where thousands of people are flocking to see a bear in a human-looking bear in a Chinese zoo while others marry AI bots, bizarre and nonsensical shows don’t seem that improper. Absurdity reminds us that life can be bizarre and make no sense sometimes, and perhaps kids know that better than the rest of us.
Don’t get me wrong, Bluey is a nice show with relatable (albeit canine) characters where everything is morally tied up neatly by the end of each episode. Similar children’s shows and literature are littered with “nice” stories that take their messaging from the self-help industry (You can achieve anything! You are special!) and repurpose it for a younger audience.
Watching Crazy Fun Park is like taking a ride on a ghost train; it’s thrilling, fun and a little creepy, but as Gaiman points out, you know the ride will eventually end, and you’ll “step out into the daylight once again”.
The surprising success of the series, which the BBC recently acquired the rights for, shows that stories can be so much more than just “nice”. They can be training grounds for children to practice their response to fear in a supervised environment when we give them the dignity of risk.
Thanks to recent pressure put on streaming giants by the federal government, Netflix and Amazon could be set to commission a lot more local content in the coming years. With the success of Crazy Fun Park now undeniable, this might signal new blood in the Australian children’s television sector. Let’s hope that with it comes some risky ventures that encourage our kids to dream and scream in equal measure. We know our children need a bit of grit and chutzpah right now.
But please, just no more Teletubbies.
Cherie Gilmore is a freelance writer.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.