Beeb gets grief for Humpty Dumpty rewrite The BBC is taking a bit of stick for rewriting Humpty Dumpty to protect wide-eyed kiddies from the terrible realisation that the combined ingenuity of all the king's horses and all the king's men proved insufficient to reassemble the poor chap. According to the Sun, CBeebies show Something Special featured a sanitised version …
is wrong with these old fairy tales they have for many many years scared children with there cannibalistic ways of eating witches and what have you what not and so forth. To use a lame excuse as "the children need to be exposed to the real world" When was the last time that anyone here baked and ate a witch? When? We need to deal with this menace to society. Rewrite all these horrible old stories. Won´t anyone think of the children?
What else can they sanitise?
How about changing rock-a-bye baby so that the council turn up and take the child into custody?
The old woman who lived in a shoe with her dozens of children could get benefits and a council house.
Jack and Jill don't fall down the hill because the council had the well closed on health & safety grounds.
The three blind mice didn't get their tales cut off, instead the farmers wife trains up the sheep dog to be a guide dog.
I don't think Cock Robin could get on the air due to the lewdness of the name corrupting children.
Yes, thanks to my traditional education I have so far avoided any kind of mishap involving egg/boy hybrids being placed in precarious aerial locations, especially those where a risk assessment should clearly indicate that a safety harness is necessary.
I also learnt that cavalry regiments are a poor substitute for properly trained doctors, and that horses do not have sufficient manual dexterity to perform microsurgery.
Watching Ricky Gervais' standup routine helped as well.
Good old MPs eh? You can rely on them for a soundbite on just about any old bollocks.
In other news "leaked documents reveal delivery address for Tesco online shopping order for 100 rolls of Andrex is Mrs B Bear, the big cave next to the trees, woody glade, the Forest."
From my understanding of the programme, the signing is in Makaton a simplified sign language for those with "learning difficulties" ie the sort MenCap looked out for.
"Happy" in Makaton is different to "Happy" in BSL: Something Special uses Makaton, so really it's a bit of a non-story on that front. (Besides, Makaton requires you to speak the words while signing them, and he's very clearly saying "Happy" ...)
And Humpty Dumpty still fell off the wall in the episode in question, Some MPs need to get their priorities right, I think.
Fail because the story's pretty rubbish in the first place, and because I've come to expect far better from this esteemed organ.
After dealing with a 7 year old crying for most of the evening as a result of listening to Puff the Magic Dragon I have to agree with him. Enough is f*** enough.
The current "positive thinking"/"political correctness" obsession has resulted in the majority of children growing up utterly unprepared for the fact that things in life do not necessarily have a happy ending. As a result once they reach the age when we can no longer hide it from them and life bitchslaps them left right a center a few times they end up emotionally scarred, lose empathy and ignore any of the principles that have been put into them using the "sugary intravenous drip".
That is how the yob is born.
I sat down with my two year old yesterday and decided to try a bit of Tom and Jerry - in one episode:
- Jerry purposely leave a skate on the floor for Tom to trip over
- Tom being hit by a tram (twice)
- Tom being shut in the freezer
- Tom being shut in the oven
- Tom eating all the pills available in the medicine cabinet
After each of these events Tom was of course fine, but I sat there cringing about letting my son witness this stuff ... but then, I used to watch these cartoons when I was young and I'm OK ...
I agree with Bilgepipe Posted Monday 19th October 2009 10:32 GMT
My (1-5 yr old) kids love the old Tom and Jerry cartoons and will sit for hours entranced while they poison each other wirth household cleaning agents and acid, gouge each others eyes out and generally go mad.
Wife not amused but they have to learn about real life somewhere...
Sadly for every one parent that believes their children should be exposed to the outside world so that they can learn to deal with it, there's one parent that thinks they need to lock their children away for their own safety, and there's one person that doesn't even have children, but feels the need to tell everyone how shocking it is, and stands up to complain for the sake all the children worldwide because it makes them feel better about the empty sad life that they must lead
Let me paraphrase Dickens:
... the wisdom of our ancestors
is in [it]; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.
it also troubles me what passes for being "creative" these days. It's not creative in a literary or cultural sense, only in a disturbing dishonest sense.
It's what we get with creative people who are afraid to be creative. They take something well known, and publish a changed version with the original name and hope that some of the original good-feeling rubs off on them.
I was this just as annoyed with BBCs last attempt at Wilkie Collins "Woman in White" which was actually a different story with the original characters. I wondered why the producer didn't just change the title and slap their name on as the author. [Answer: because no-one would have watched it]
Sam
Full Dickens quote below:
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors
is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that
Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mate, seriously, get a grip.
They probably only did it that way because they couldn't figure out a good enough way to get Mr Tumble (Justin Fletcher) dressed up as Humpty Dumpty break into pieces and then have people attempt to put him back together.
I can imagine the conversation...
"How are we going to do this? We've only got 3 hours of studio time left and Blankety Blank like to get started early"
"There is no easy way, we just can't get him to break into pieces, who do you think we are anyway, Industrial Light and Magic?"
"We could just say 'and Humpty Dumpty is happy again' at the end and call it a day."
"Sorted, lets get going"
"Oh hang on, wait a minute, what about the social ramifications of portraying happy endings where ever possible, surly that will give our blessed children a false expectation of what life is about and cause them to become malcontent and yobbish in the long run"
"F*** Off"
Can someone explain to me where this notion of Humtpy Dumpty being a human/egg hybrid comes from?
As far as I remember the Rhyme it doesn't specify anywhere his size, shape, colour or creed.
It is simply a cautionary tale that if you fall off a wall, don't expect to be able to be fixed!
Mind you - some of our MPs need shoving off walls...
May I propose that the verb 'to humpty' is used henceforth for all changes, modifications and edits to any story, particularly where it refers to some fabrication to protect the audience from an unfortunate truth? It would be a damned sight better than 'to sex up' which the media has developed a small obsession with since the Iraq war dossier debacle.
Unless of course the Ms. Bee sees fit to right royally humpty my suggestion.
back in the "good old days" (aka "about 10 years ago") Teletubbies used to feature in their "tubby-tv" segments a Jazz group playing versions of nursery rhymes ... one of them was humpty dumpty which ended with something along the lines of "someone go get a pan ... he's all scrambled eggs now man!"
Of course he cried - its a bleeding depressing song!
But for fun try this experiment:
Week 1 - write to the Sun complaining that a local school is censoring the bloody parts of famous stories for young children. Watch response
Week 2 - write to the Sun complaining that a local school is reading Heart of Darkness to youngsters. Watch response
Week 3 - write to Sun noting the dichotomy of the responses. See nothing happen
If IIRC and to provide an IT angle for this story, the fortune file on Berkeley 4.2 UNIX contained a fortune that indicated that "Fairy Tales are scary stories designed to prepare children for the tv news".
I can't help but feel that as on many other occasions the fortune program had a more rational view on life than many a modern moralist.
justin is the best thing on cbeebies. if some deaf parents can't tell the difference between makaton and british sign language, more the fool them. something special is not designed to tech british sign language to kids, but let everyone communicate. the sun are a bunch of no brained dim whits for the most part.
Utter crap!
Kids are very savvy, most can tell the difference between and egg and a human being, believe it or not! FFS!
My little 7 year old loves playing FPS shooters, when there's no one else there, simply wandering about a 3D computer landscape, you can't remove weapons but she knows it's all make believe and not real! She doesn't like the full gameplay, just the beautiful immersive 3D worlds in things like Cube2 and UT3. My missus was starting to get worried, but we did something radical! We all sat down and TALKED together to make sure we all understood that anything in computer games is only make-believe and not real. You can't get hurt and no one else gets hurt!
Just pretend! Just like a story about an egg falling off a wall, an egg, let's remember with arms and legs and some form of cognitive ability, that realises it's own mortality! FFS, you'd have to be on drugs to fully appreciate most of the nursery rhyme stories to their full degree!
Fucking do-gooders, think they know what's best again!
Give kid's some credit FFS!
I seem to recall one where three brothers who are woodcutters enter a competition to find a husband for the princess. One of them succeeds and does the whole 'happily ever after' thing, the losers get flogged until their ribs show (!), have salt rubbed into the wounds (!!) and are chased off into the forest to starve (!!!). A valuable caution on the consequences of high-stakes gambling.
Some memorable life lessons from old stories. We want more like that.
We have the ugly sisters chopping bits off their feet to try and fit into the glass slipper. Red Riding Hood's granny gets eaten. Rapunzel's prince gets blinded. Every step the mermaid takes burns her, and she still doesn't get the guy she fancies. Snow White's stepmother asks for her heart to be ripped out and brought to her, as proof she's dead.
And then we have the wicked sister/stepmother/witch, who is variously burned alive, put into red-hot metal shoes so she dies of pain/shock/blood-loss, poisoned, beheaded, thrown to her death, or put naked into a barrel with spikes on the inside and then thrown in the river.
Not to mention the sexual element, where Cinderella's shoe, in the original French, actually means "fur slipper". And she doesn't drop it, she gives her fur slipper to the prince to "try on". Okaaay...
is originally based on real life (or death, to be pedantic). The name is derived from Guillaume le Dompter, aka William the Conqueror, who, had he lived long enough, would have qualified as a TellyTubby. In short, he was obese, to the extent that King Philip of France apparently said he looked like a pregnant woman. During the siege of Mantes Bill, fell off his horse and the pommel of his saddle caused severe abdominal injuries (the mind boggles at just how) from which he died. As the ambulance drivers were on strike and the NHS in its pre-infancy, poor Bill was indeed left to the tender mercies of his cavalry. There was also a bit of a to-do at his funeral; the body was so bloated it wouldn't fit in the coffin. Episcopal pressure trying to cram him in caused the body to burst, "filling the church with a foul smell".
Not a happy ending, but that's the sort of story that kids, in my experience, like.
I must have seen too many Loony Tunes cartoons as a kid. That's why keep walking around a barnyard, playing practical jokes on a dog, and shouting "DOO DAH" at random intervals. (Intervals, that is.)
Then again, my family is southern, so that alone might explain it. (Pay attention when I'm typing at you, son.)
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It's not as entertaining as watching the Tikkabilla presenters pretend to cut a *plastic drinking* straw with an *axe* (definitely OTT, obvious psychopathic tendencies etc etc) in order to fix the hole in Dear Henry's bucket - now there's revisionism to put the BBC up there with holocaust deniers.
(Yes I do have a toddler. No, I don't watch these for fun... at least, not Tikkabilla and even Gigglebiz gets a bit boring by the twenty-seventh forced viewing)
Humpty dumpty is not a nice fairy tale about an accident prone egg. It refers to a canon used during the English civil war that was mounted on St Marys church wall in Colechester. The tower where humpty was mounted was hit and humpty had a great fall. The kings men couldn't put humpty back together again.
To change the nursey rhyme is to change history itself. Why don't these idiots at the BBC who haven't got a clue stop messing with things that aren't broken. Try teaching your children about history and make it fun my learning hmmm I don't know a rhyme perhaps to accompany it?
If we don't stop wrapping our children up in cotton wool we won't be going to the moon nor explore the furthest depths of the oceans instead we'll have them in padded cells where they can't get hurt.
That well-worn line "won't somebody think of the children?" is going to come back to bite us in the next couple of decades, and it'll serve us all bloody right.
We're afraid to let them hear or see anything scary, we're terrified that they could get even the smallest of injuries while playing, some parenting now resembles protective custody more than it resembles a normal upbringing.
We buy into the notion that everything has to be sprayed with disinfectant and that you must always have hand sanitizer available. Then have to buy other products to boost the immune systems that haven't been exposed to the normal everyday stuff that we *have* an immune system to protect against.
I've been to a few school competitions where they, in effect, gave out awards FOR SHOWING UP.
Never mind "think of the children", won't somebody please think of the future adults?
One day this generation of risk-averse, auto-immune deficient sheltered kids with a diminished concept of "winning" and "losing" are going to be in charge. Our only hope is that they do what kids generally do and rebel against their upbringing.
There is some evidence that the Cinderella story goes way back to ancient China to a story originally extolling the virtues of foot binding* - the whole 'small foot wins the prince' thing fits. Also, pre-Disney, Cinderella was rather a nasty little bitch in most interpretations.
(*Note that foot binding done 'properly' doesn't just involve restricting the growth of the foot from an early age - the foot is first crushed with a rock and curled around itself!! Thank goodness in this enlightened age we just have the fashion-shoe industry to mangle our feet for us.)
>and there's one person that doesn't even have children, but feels the need to tell everyone how shocking it is, and stands up to complain for the sake all the children worldwide because it makes them feel better about the empty sad life that they must lead<
Twat! Sorry, had to say it, and for all those fullfilled adults mindlessly giving birth...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
>Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat.
# At over 6.7 billion[4] World Population is approximately 3 times higher in 2009 than it was at approximately 2.3 billion or less[5] in 1939, despite loss of life during World War II (an upper estimate of which is some 72 million).
# Dramatic growth since around 1950 coinciding with greatly increased food production as a result of the heavy industrialisation of agriculture (known as the Green Revolution). Population is forecast to carry on growing to 8.9 billion, 9.2 billion[3], 9.5 billion[4] or perhaps even 11 billion by 2050.<
Plus, of course, the old nursery rythmes and stories were for old style living (don't leave the forest path - what forests the modern kid is thinking, the only forests they see is SpeedTree in a computer game). What the (other peoples) children need, is some modern cautionary tales, like not accepting sweets or kindness from strangers, or, how it's not generally wolves but kindly uncles who will kill them, and how staring slackjawed at games consoles will totally prepare them for that coming zombie holocaust.
All IMHO of course.
...the English are a soft and fragile lot. Starved of vitamin D for countless generations, and bred, by natural selection, into a tolerance for airborne soot and icy damp at the expense of a general physical infirmity that manifests itself as a hunched, twisted, stature and enfeebled demeanor, it is little wonder that they require protection from even the merest suggestion of physical harm.
Your common or garden Englishman (or Land Morlock, as they are known in scientific circles) is so weakened by the cold, wet, inhospitable climes of the barren rocky outcrop in the Atlantic on which they scratch their meager and, lets face it, pointless, existence that it is a wonder they have not been completely pulverised by centuries of shakespearean and dickensian literary tragedy. One can only imagine that in the past the hopeful prospect of deportation to the colonies sustained them through those brief times when they weren't suffocated into delirium by coal dust or paralysed with drunkenness and mild toxic shock from the fermented soup that passes for beer in those parts.
Truly a pitiable curiosity, is the Englishman. An evolutionary dead end that nature sees fit to sustain for the amusement of the badgers and the hedgehogs.
Also, on a completely unrelated matter, until that blighted land can string together five summer days without rain, no more cricket tours. There is something truly wrong when your best performing sportsman is "Rain Stopped Play". Seriously. Give him an OBE and retire him to the members' where he can be dismal and dreary in likeminded company...
Frankly, I'm sick of people like you. I take it that people like you are those responsible for having Arthur, Caillou, and various of my other favorite TV shows canceled while insisting that a certain purple dinosaur I despise be shown on 6 different channels no less than 6 times a day.
Black heli. I'm gonna grab Airwolf and the A-Team, find you and then rip out your flawed brains.
Yes, the original Humpty Dumpty rhyme was about a cannon:
http://www.rhymes.org.uk/humpty_dumpty.htm
That it is now something else does not mean that political correctness should be allowed to intervene. Life is tough, hard, it is about survival not some PC idiot's idea of cotton wool. Off with their bloody heads I say.
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