{"id":3278,"date":"2015-12-04T22:30:19","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T22:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3278"},"modified":"2015-12-04T22:30:19","modified_gmt":"2015-12-04T22:30:19","slug":"watch-with-father-6-whats-the-big-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3278","title":{"rendered":"Watch With Father #6: What’s The Big Idea?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s The Big Idea?<\/em> is a strange little show. \u00a0CBeebies\u00a0seems to schedule it mainly on the principle that it is five minutes long, and can thus be\u00a0neatly slotted into any awkward five-minute gaps. \u00a0For a while, they were showing it directly after\u00a0Swashbuckle<\/em>, which was a sudden gear change if ever there was one.\u00a0 Because\u00a0What’s The Big Idea?<\/em> is a pre-school philosophy show.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

CBeebies\u00a0tends 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\u00a0Sesame Street<\/em> but we do get\u00a0The Furchester Hotel<\/em>. \u00a0And\u00a0it goes without saying that\u00a0the economics of\u00a0children’s TV tend to encourage this sort of thing. \u00a0There’s a limit on the\u00a0potential audience here, but by\u00a0joining forces with your counterparts in other countries and\u00a0taking advantage of the fact that\u00a0animation\u00a0is relatively easy to\u00a0convert to different languages,\u00a0the numbers\u00a0must start to look a\u00a0little happier.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0us, this has one happy side effect. \u00a0The BBC don’t post entire episodes of the show on YouTube, and right now, there isn’t one available on iPlayer either. \u00a0But their Argentinian counterparts Pakapaka have put one of the episodes up, so here’s an episode in Spanish, if you’re interested.<\/a><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It’s based on\u00a0the book\u00a0Le Livre des Grands Contraires Philosophiques<\/em> by Oscar Brenifer and Jacques Despr\u00e9s<\/a>, which invited French children to ponder such contrasts as “the self and others”, “time and eternity” and “subjective and objective”. \u00a0That book seems to have\u00a0led to a number of spin-offs,\u00a0covering\u00a0the whole range of\u00a0questions likely to rank as important in the mind of\u00a0the small French child, from the relatively mundane\u00a0Pourquoi Je Dois Aller \u00e0 l’\u00c9cole<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>to the\u00a0epic\u00a0La Question de Dieu<\/a><\/i>\u00a0(whose\u00a0cover depicts\u00a0a small child standing enigmatically next to an empty throne).<\/p>\n

What those books actually contain – judging from the\u00a0previews on the publisher’s website – are\u00a0straightforward explanations of\u00a0big but basic ideas, illustrated with strikingly stylised, and often quite beautiful, images. \u00a0The art plays up the generic nature of its human figures by dressing them all in identical orange jumpsuits.<\/p>\n

This is the style which the TV show roughly emulates, except that it’s\u00a0tried to give the exercise a bit more personality. \u00a0So\u00a0in the show, there’s a child lead character, Hugo, though he’s still one of the orange jumpsuited masses. \u00a0But there is no plot, and no real setting as such. \u00a0Instead, episodes consist of Hugo asking questions of the two narrators – Felix and Lily, both seemingly also children – and either challenging\u00a0their answers or following up with more questions, before ending on some particularly tricky\u00a0point that it wants you to discuss with your child. \u00a0Along\u00a0the way,\u00a0various scenes illustrate the points that are being made, sometimes with running gags, but never with any pretence of narrative. \u00a0It’s not a million miles from the structure of\u00a0Action Philosophers,\u00a0<\/em>except\u00a0without the biographical focus and aiming much simpler.<\/p>\n

So, for example, the “Love” episode – which is the Spanish language one linked above – starts off along these lines. \u00a0Hugo asks what love is. \u00a0The narrators try to tell him that it’s basically liking things, but an awful lot. \u00a0Oh right, says Hugo. \u00a0In that case, I love my spade. \u00a0Ah, say the narrators. \u00a0No you don’t. \u00a0That’s a spade. \u00a0You can’t love a spade. \u00a0It’s an inanimate object. \u00a0Hold on, says Hugo. \u00a0What about him over there, with his dolly? \u00a0He loves his dolly. \u00a0Um, say the narrators. \u00a0You might have a point there… \u00a0And so forth.<\/p>\n

Now, okay,\u00a0this 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\u00a0tiny heads spinning by bombarding them with questions\u00a0and encouraging them to\u00a0start\u00a0thinking through the implications. \u00a0Since 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\u00a0rules at all”, preferring the\u00a0safer waters of “when is it\u00a0okay to\u00a0ignore the rules”, which it illustrates with a scene of a\u00a0superhero letting a\u00a0baddie escape because he\u00a0feels obliged to\u00a0stop at a “keep off the grass” sign.<\/p>\n

The characters are no longer wholly generic, as they appear to be in the books. \u00a0Hugo has a name, and some degree of personality, even if it’s mainly “asks a lot of awkward questions”. \u00a0And though the characters customise their jumpsuits to a degree, they\u00a0remain jumpsuits, giving everything a\u00a0deliberately abstracted feel and an unspoken undercurrent of “all the same, really”. \u00a0So while the rest of Hugo’s family wear orange\u00a0jumpsuits like his, his\u00a0big sister is\u00a0apparently a teenage goth. That means she gets to wear a\u00a0black<\/em> jumpsuit, and massive headphones.<\/a> \u00a0But\u00a0it’s still a jumpsuit, and (more subtly) it still has orange trimmings. \u00a0(You can see her sitting on the park bench at 3:00 in the\u00a0love episode, blanking Hugo as usual.)<\/p>\n

For this to work\u00a0it has to be entertaining, and\u00a0there’s something\u00a0very endearing about\u00a0What’s the Big Idea?<\/em>‘s mixture of big concepts and gently\u00a0comic\u00a0examples. \u00a0And it tends to get amused giggling from The Child, who is too young to really understand it, which suggests\u00a0that the animation is\u00a0doing something right. \u00a0At any rate, the approach here is\u00a0to 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. \u00a0As a five-minute bomb of concentrated “Yeah, but…” thrown into the CBeebies schedule, it does that job rather nicely.<\/p>\n

Next time:\u00a0<\/em>Something Special<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s The Big Idea? is a strange little show. \u00a0CBeebies\u00a0seems to schedule it mainly on the principle that it is five minutes long, and can thus be\u00a0neatly slotted into any awkward five-minute gaps. \u00a0For a while, they were showing it directly after\u00a0Swashbuckle, which was a sudden gear change if ever there was one.\u00a0 Because\u00a0What’s The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-watch-with-father"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3279,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3278\/revisions\/3279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}