Children’s TV: the great Euro divide

PAV’S PATCH: IT may not be politically correct to say so, but I have never quite felt the Europeans are like us.

That’s not a slur on our cousins from across the Channel, it’s just that wonderful as continental Europe is, everything they do is, well, not quite the same.

Until now, that’s just been a feeling. However, I now have incontrovertible proof that things are genuinely different — children’s telly from the 1960s and 1970s.

I don’t imagine anyone under the age of 40 reads this column, but I’m sure regulars will remember the five-minute programmes the BBC used to wind up children’s viewing just before the news came on.

The classic one was “The Magic Roundabout”, which came from Belgium. It was something that was always beyond me. There is a suggestion that the programme was hatched during a drug-fuelled haze and I can see why people might think that.

Could you imagine going to a broadcaster in this country and suggesting a series of bite-size shows about a moustachioed man on a spring, a shaggy dog, a cow, a hippy rabbit and a man on a high-speed tricycle? Even in these days of making people eat kangaroo’s armpits, I don’t think it would get very far.

But there was more. “Barbapapa”. Now what was that all about? This Dutch show featured a family of strange creatures including one that played a flute, called Barbalala.

The whole thing was very psychedelic and if you look at it on the internet you’ll wonder why anyone ever got upset over “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

Remember “Tintin”? This was another Belgian offering and you had to watch for three weeks for anything to happen. And Tintin was remarkably odd. He had a strange hairstyle and always wore plus-fours. Only Europe could get excited about him.

In 1970, I was taken to Strasbourg to visit an aunt. I went full of hopes of fun and games and suffered two weeks of utter boredom. In Strasbourg you could receive French, German and Swiss telly and it was all garbage, including dubbed episodes of “Skippy der busch kengeroo”.

It was mind-numbingly boring. Added to which my aunty insisted she had colour television but, in fact, had only some sort of plastic screen with bands of colour across it. It was unbelievably naff. So bad that Stan Ogden bought one for Hilda in “Coronation Street”.

So when the referendum comes, bear this in mind. I would hate to have telly designed by the bureaucrats of Brussels. Goodness knows ours is bad enough.