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Lauren’s nice though, eh boys?

But Mr Harley, don’t go dissing The Late Show now …

So far it’s bad enough that it fails as story-telling and as television. But the worst aspect of LazyTown is its underlying sanctimoniousness; the entire show is founded on the premise that it must ‘get positive messages’ across at all costs. The programme-makers have put so much effort into doing this that no attention paid to good story-telling or strong characters. Every plot twist is set up simply so that Sportacus can appear as the patronising adult who knows what best, and proceed to deliver one of his pious little homilies about health, hygiene and supposedly ‘good’ behaviour. The puppet characters who inhabit LazyTown are merely idiotic blobs whose sole function is to get into trouble so that they can be rescued by the ghastly Sportacus.

LazyTown’s perception of humanity seems to me so incredibly bland; no complexity, nothing problematic in this determinedly upbeat, ‘get-with-the-programme’ styled view of the human race. Why do the programme-makers think that children are so incapable of dealing with ‘difficult’ things? People are either cheerful village idiots (population of town), vacuously optimistic (Stephanie), or scheming spoilsports (Robbie Rotten). It’s doubly ironic that the so-called ‘villain’ is the only one who does anything active, considering the subtext of the whole show is ‘don’t be lazy’.

Lastly, who decided what these positive messages should be? Is there really a consensus of opinion as to how children should be behaving? According to LazyTown, it’s all exercise, clean your teeth, get to bed early, don’t make so much noise, eat your fruit…I thought all of this had gone the way of the Victorian story-book primer, filled with its ‘improving’ messages which Lewis Carroll found so tedious and stuffy. One glance at the show’s official website and you will find a page called ‘To the parents’, where the following examples of creepy corporate-speak reveal the dangerous assumptions running through these people’s minds: ‘healthy lifestyle choices’…’they can’t help but engage’…’what kids learn stays with them’…’raising healthy and well-adjusted children is an objective we share with parents everywhere’…’we want kids to experience joy’.

What utter drivel; dangerous, loaded, manipulative. If I had children I wouldn’t let them near this show!

As to the current creative control at the BBC, I would further take them to task over two other matters. Firstly, the sleek, visual look of the new series which strikes me as little more than a misguided attempt to make Doctor Who resemble a Hollywood sci-fi or action adventure movie. Again, the original appeal of the 1960s and 1970s shows – which are object lessons in how imagination and ingenuity can prevail in the face of a non-existent special effects budget – have been jettisoned in favour of images which, for all their apparent realism, leave nothing for the eye or mind of the viewer to do.

Secondly, and this is a far more pervasive phenomenon not just in this series but in television generally, the scripts have clearly been written by very knowing, overly-sophisticated writers, who have at their fingertips the entire history of Dr Who, and are aiming their ideas squarely at the equally well-informed fanbase. In favour of original ideas, we’re getting the TV equivalent of a dig in the ribs. We’re almost ending up with a species of meta-Dr Who script, a phenomenon we’ve already seen in the world of comic books some 20 years ago (when Alan Moore and Frank Miller started to produce their intellectual revisionist versions of superhero characters). It’s also discernible in Hollywood movie scripts of the last 15 years, where the writers appear to have studied every possible post-Freudian analytical monograph about the hidden meanings of classic Hollywood cinema from Hitchcock onwards. The difference is they are now deliberately planting their own hidden subtexts and references right in the script; any viewing pleasure for the audience now resides simply in spotting them and crossing them off the checklist, like a passive spectator at the arena.

I would argue that this mode of writing, like the over-elaborate CGI imagery, is highly deleterious to the imagination of the viewer. The original Dr Who, for all its clunkiness, occasionally managed to tap into some very basic human fears and psychological dilemmas, and often presented them without the need for meta-textual comment. Which is why every nostalgic viewer of the show retells their own version of ‘hiding behind the sofa’ whenever the scary monster appeared. Sadly, given the way this show has developed into something where imagination is throttled by the need to over-explain everything, we’re unlikely to recapture that level of innocence ever again.