Time For Bed, Children

I knew Children's tv was all too nice and middle class before I started to watch this week's BBC4 series. Even the bullies of Grange Hill weren't convincingly menacing.

But as with that Seven Ages of Rock shite, they're messing with my head.

Growing up, at bedtime us kids were told by our dad it was time to "go up the wooden 'ill."

Going "up the wooden 'ill" linked us to a proud history of working class people, generation after generation coaxed by fathers to get up those bleedin' stairs. Maybe not as working class as those kids who went "up the old apples and pears" but proudly working class all the same.

But what do we get from the BBC?

Apparently in the early days of children's tv, the BBC didn't broadcast for an hour after the kids had stopped watching their programmes so that these kids could be taken...

up the wooden hill..

to Bedfordshire!

Bedfordshire is pronounced "Bedfordshur", as the Queen would say. Not "Bedfordsheer" as you or I would say or "Bedfordshyre" as in the venacular of the common country person.

Going up the wooden hill is my heritage. We knew we were going to bed, we didn't need to be told we were going to an unremarkable county in the heartland of England.

"Bedfordshur" would be a place where the child would be read Beatrix Potter or Rupert the Bear before going sleepy byes.

Or maybe middle class kids didn't go sleepy byes, maybe they went to the land of nod on a cushion of clouds, dreaming of being Peter Pan or Wendy.

I have cause to visit the real Bedfordshire now and then. And do you know what?

I never get a good night's sleep.