Death to Caillou

I recently wrote about how horrid Max and Ruby on Treehouse was. For different reasons, Caillou is almost as bad.

Like Max and Ruby, Caillou is Canadian, so my heart should be filled with pride. Unfortunately it's also annoying as hell. Caillou is a bald four-year-old kid with a whiny voice, part of a white-bread family that is sickeningly saccharine (interestingly, Caillou presents one of the only 'conventional families' on Treehouse). The individual characters on Caillou are pretty bad, but considered alone they wouldn't throw the programme so high on the annoying list.

What does that, instead, is the show's entire lack of regard for conventionaly storytelling. I can remember as a child being shown a graph that started from zero, slowly rose to a peak, and then came crashing down rapidly thereafter: the Nike swoosh turned upside-down. This, I was told, represented a plot graph. All good stories followed it.

The creator of Caillou, animated as the narrator in the occassional framing device that imagines a group of children excited to hear a story about Caillou, evidently knows nothing of this. For a Caillou story has no exposition, no climax, no denouement. It's merely a few random details in the life of a normal kid stitched together into a story. It might be: 'Caillou goes to the Laundromat'. And it might go something like this:

'One day, Caillou got his clothing dirty. So he went to his mother about it. "Oh no," said his mother, "your clothing is dirty. We'd better get that washed up." So his mother prepared some laundry and asked Caillou if he wanted to go to the laundromat. Caillou had never been to a laundromat before. So he was very happy. At the laundromat were many big machines. Caillou was amazed by them. "Mommy", he said, "what do these machines do?" His mother told him they made clothing clean. She started to fill a machine and asked Caillou if he wanted to help. He said yes. When his mother started the machine, it made a big noise and started turnig. Caillou was amazed. He watched the machine turn around and around again. That evening at dinner, Caillou told his father about his adventure at the laundromat. "Good for you", said his father.'

Seriously - what the hell is that? I wrote that, but all I'lve really done is shorten it from the prototype. I haven't altered the banality level at all. Caillou really is shockingly banal - nothing at all extraordinary ever happens, or even anything above 'run of the mill'. Some episodes seem to have a touch of moralising, which I guess means it's better than merely watching the neighbours through their living room window for half an hour at a time, but who can make it as far as the moral without falling asleep? One thing Caillou also is is shockinglyboring.

If the goal is to crush a childhood imagination by subjecting kids to a programme featuring a painful lack of imagination, then Caillou is a success.

Death to Max and Ruby

So 'irl' I have a baby girl. One of the things this entails is the need to have cartoons on TV more often than any adult human can stand. This, in our case, manifests itself in 'Treehouse', a Corus TV channel that is all told fairly innocuous, because the cartoons are not violent and there is minimal advertising.

But it has to be said that, while a handful of their shows are quite charming indeed, several of them are fingernails-on-blackboard grating, few more than Max & Ruby.

Max & Ruby, along with Toopy & Binoo and 4 Square, is the channel's main time-killer. If they find themselves with a few minutes to kill before the half-hour, time that other channels would fill with advertising, they tend to throw on a Max & Ruby. If you leave this channel on for a few hours at a time, you're guaranteed to see Max & Ruby at least a few times. And while no proof has ever been established between violent cartoons and violence among viewers, I can say at least conjecturally that Max & Ruby fills me with a homicidal rage. It is so annoying.

It's the story of two rabbits: a bratty kid, Max, who says one word over and over every episode, and Ruby, an obnoxious know-it-all who, by comparison, never shuts up. They're apparently 3 and 7 respectively, and appear to live at home alone with no parents and just a grandmother who lives nearby. A such, Ruby serves as the 'mother figure', and in fact the programme's main value is in teaching older sisters how to be insufferably bossy. Every single episode is functionally the same: Max wants to play with something and insists on doing it over and over again until you're filled with an urge to smack him upside his creepy squeaking head, while Ruby is obsessed with some banal thing she's got it in her head she must do. Max's OCD meets Ruby's OCD and what ensues is much paternalistic sighing on Ruby's part and 'Max, I know you want Diet Coke and Mentos, but you can't have them right now. I simply have to given Grandma her enema now.' Inevitably, whatever it is Max is trying to do accidentally helps with whatever it is Ruby's trying to do, and while Ruby's grateful as the credits run, it doesn't prevent her from being exasperated with Max all over again next time out.

Ruby's annoying whine is the low point of the show. I actually find it difficult to sit in the same room when it's on. God knows what kids are supposed to get from this show, except 'how to be annoying'.

And a good many kids are already experts there.