What’s The Big Idea? is a strange little show.  CBeebies seems to schedule it mainly on the principle that it is five minutes long, and can thus be neatly slotted into any awkward five-minute gaps.  For a while, they were showing it directly after Swashbuckle, which was a sudden gear change if ever there was one.  Because What’s The Big Idea? is a pre-school philosophy show.

This might sound insanely niche, but judging from the barrage of production credits that appears at the end of each episode, some 13 channels around the world all thought they had a use for a five minute philosophy animation.

CBeebies tends not to go in for imports, but is more than happy to chip in for a co-production – which is why we don’t get Sesame Street but we do get The Furchester Hotel.  And it goes without saying that the economics of children’s TV tend to encourage this sort of thing.  There’s a limit on the potential audience here, but by joining forces with your counterparts in other countries and taking advantage of the fact that animation is relatively easy to convert to different languages, the numbers must start to look a little happier.

For us, this has one happy side effect.  The BBC don’t post entire episodes of the show on YouTube, and right now, there isn’t one available on iPlayer either.  But their Argentinian counterparts Pakapaka have put one of the episodes up, so here’s an episode in Spanish, if you’re interested.

Despite its international funding – and the fact that many episodes are credited to writers with British-sounding names – the show has its roots in France.  It’s based on the book Le Livre des Grands Contraires Philosophiques by Oscar Brenifer and Jacques Després, which invited French children to ponder such contrasts as “the self and others”, “time and eternity” and “subjective and objective”.  That book seems to have led to a number of spin-offs, covering the whole range of questions likely to rank as important in the mind of the small French child, from the relatively mundane Pourquoi Je Dois Aller à l’École to the epic La Question de Dieu (whose cover depicts a small child standing enigmatically next to an empty throne).

What those books actually contain – judging from the previews on the publisher’s website – are straightforward explanations of big but basic ideas, illustrated with strikingly stylised, and often quite beautiful, images.  The art plays up the generic nature of its human figures by dressing them all in identical orange jumpsuits.

This is the style which the TV show roughly emulates, except that it’s tried to give the exercise a bit more personality.  So in the show, there’s a child lead character, Hugo, though he’s still one of the orange jumpsuited masses.  But there is no plot, and no real setting as such.  Instead, episodes consist of Hugo asking questions of the two narrators – Felix and Lily, both seemingly also children – and either challenging their answers or following up with more questions, before ending on some particularly tricky point that it wants you to discuss with your child.  Along the way, various scenes illustrate the points that are being made, sometimes with running gags, but never with any pretence of narrative.  It’s not a million miles from the structure of Action Philosophers, except without the biographical focus and aiming much simpler.

So, for example, the “Love” episode – which is the Spanish language one linked above – starts off along these lines.  Hugo asks what love is.  The narrators try to tell him that it’s basically liking things, but an awful lot.  Oh right, says Hugo.  In that case, I love my spade.  Ah, say the narrators.  No you don’t.  That’s a spade.  You can’t love a spade.  It’s an inanimate object.  Hold on, says Hugo.  What about him over there, with his dolly?  He loves his dolly.  Um, say the narrators.  You might have a point there…  And so forth.

Now, okay, this is as much about exploring different shades of meaning of the word “love” as anything else, but it’s still pretty clearly a show designed to send tiny heads spinning by bombarding them with questions and encouraging them to start thinking through the implications.  Since it’s aiming at very young children, it tends not to push its luck too far – the episode on “rules” steers well clear of the awkward question of “why should I obey rules at all”, preferring the safer waters of “when is it okay to ignore the rules”, which it illustrates with a scene of a superhero letting a baddie escape because he feels obliged to stop at a “keep off the grass” sign.

The characters are no longer wholly generic, as they appear to be in the books.  Hugo has a name, and some degree of personality, even if it’s mainly “asks a lot of awkward questions”.  And though the characters customise their jumpsuits to a degree, they remain jumpsuits, giving everything a deliberately abstracted feel and an unspoken undercurrent of “all the same, really”.  So while the rest of Hugo’s family wear orange jumpsuits like his, his big sister is apparently a teenage goth. That means she gets to wear a black jumpsuit, and massive headphones.  But it’s still a jumpsuit, and (more subtly) it still has orange trimmings.  (You can see her sitting on the park bench at 3:00 in the love episode, blanking Hugo as usual.)

For this to work it has to be entertaining, and there’s something very endearing about What’s the Big Idea?‘s mixture of big concepts and gently comic examples.  And it tends to get amused giggling from The Child, who is too young to really understand it, which suggests that the animation is doing something right.  At any rate, the approach here is to try and push kids towards critical thinking from as young an age as possible, on the sensible footing that learning to think is as important as learning facts.  As a five-minute bomb of concentrated “Yeah, but…” thrown into the CBeebies schedule, it does that job rather nicely.

Next time: Something Special.