Be a Better Britophile: Loads Better Than Sesame Street

. A blogumn by Fiona Craig To really get to the core of the British psyche you have to toddle down the murky corridors of our past. Not to the time of the Roman invasion or the Norman Conquest must we look, but in fact somewhere a little closer to teatime. While mothers dallied themselves in the nation’s kitchens, boiling our fish fingers and sprouts with as much exuberance as a teenage sales girl on prom night, we sat google-eyed, transfixed by the spoils that our walnut-veneered, cathode-ray companion served up. If, like me, you are around a certain age, you will remember with the kind of nostalgia only previously reserved for the blitz, the intoxicating world that was 1970’s and ‘80s children’s TV programmes. Lock any two otherwise sane and rational British adults in a room for long enough and eventually the talk will turn to children’s TV. The programmes we watched in our formative years leave such an impression that we feel compelled to recount them regularly, at any given prompt. There was so much great Kids TV produced in the seventies that it seems unfair to mention only a few here. But do make the jump to read all about them and watch some vids: From Oliver Postgates classics like Bagpuss and The Clangers, through to perenial favourites like Rainbow, Mr. Benn and The Magic Roundabout, there was so much going on back then. Derived from the minds of a generation still buzzing from the high of the sixties, some of the scenarios for these programmes were pretty far out if not downright psychedelic. Take The Clangers for example, a programme which featured a number of small creatures living in peace and harmony on a small, hollow planet far far away,...