Crisis as parenting is outsourced to BBC! Children unable to sleep without soporific bullshit to ease them along! Oh the humanity!

So, In The Night Garden is due to finish in its present format, leaving Iggle Piggle (bastard son of Spongebob Square Pants and a crack-addict female jellybaby) Upsy Daisy (clearly the product of a hedonistic night of passion between a pillow and Frank Zappa) and Makka Pakka, who can only really be described as the larval stage of the Golgothan shit-demon from the movie “Dogma”.

All things must come to an end and sometimes we are sad to see them leave, but in this case I am breathing a huge sigh of relief as an institution that I firmly believe is bad for our children is finally taken out the back, given a last cigarette and shot in the face. Hopefully in comedic fashion using a harpoon, but I digress.

A great deal of people are fans of this show, and that is fair enough. I can fully understand why children enjoy the show as it is a sedate affair, with soft speech and nothing threatening, and parents find it keeps their children calm and happy. Fine, but throwing an armful of potent marijuana into an open fire and getting your kids to sit in front of it would have the same basic effect.

Pardon me for wanting my children to learn to speak English, but I don’t want them exposed to a world of Ninky Nonks and Pinky ponks, sponge demons and Aah-Boos at an age when they are supposed to be learning to converse.

What’s wrong with animals? Or people? Or calling a train a train and a zeppelin a zeppelin instead of making up bullshit names for things, then having to teach the child later on that that is not what they are called?

But the thing that really got me, was the reaction of one of the parents. “Now my child will not be able to get to sleep in the evening.”

I’m sorry, what? At bedtime you stick your children in front of the electric fish-tank until they fall to sleep? You have out-sourced an essential part of being a parent to the BBC? Are you completely, totally fucking insane?

A bit of TV is fine and can be an excellent educational tool if handled properly, but to think that you use it as an auditory equivalent of valium to make up for your own inadequacies as a parent is frankly galling, and I would love to meet up with you and punch you in the head, if I’m honest.

Every year it’s the same, record pass rates in GCSE’s, mingled with never before seen levels of illiteracy.

I once threw a teenage lad out of a shopping centre and told him that once his ban was lifted, he would have to apply in writing to the management for permission to return. His response? I can’t write. Was he severely dyslexic? Did he have a learning difficulty? No, and yes, I did ask. He had an attitude problem at that was about it.

Do I have a sneaky suspicion that the dumbing down of children’s TV might (in part) be responsible for things like this? You bet I bloody do.

Ok, so we had the Transformers, Thundercats and the X-Men which were lots of fun with bright colours, explosions and a lot of violence, but with it we had morality, not to mention the fact that even the bad guys had the decency to speak English in an intelligible fashion.

Should small children’s television be fun, with oodles of fun characters and silliness, an innocent place where people come to no harm and the good guys always win? Yes, absolutely.

But should childhood be spent growing up in front of a load of fuzzy, inoffensive nonsense that will have the same basic effect as ramming a knitting needle into my child’s brain so that I too can slack off from parenting and raise a dribbling, poorly educated moron? Should it bollocks.

I’ve been Alec, and if you’ve been allowing a household appliance to take your place as a parent, you’ve been a fucking idiot.

Ciao!