I sat with a close friend of mine some time ago and I remember one of our conversations about our past and growing up with all the TV shows like Paddington Bear, The Wombles and Patch Kids. I remember fondly how at that age we would pay particular attention to the Teddy Bear in a Blue hat and his gentleman like qualities and politeness. I remember the civilised nature of the gathering of the Wombles of Wimbledon and how they would always lend a helping hand to one another, regardless. I remember the way the children of the cupboard, all patched up, would play together regardless of ’stitching’ and ‘patches’. We remember fondly.

Today its a very different story. The same people who churned out quality child programming, the BBC, decided to tune and tap into the new world and get rid of the old and bring in the ‘funk’ machine, most notably, The Teletubbies. In their over sized alien outfits, the hip foursome ran amok in a field and generally only interacted with a few hundred rabbits, a baby gurgling sun, the ‘tubby toast’ machine and themselves. That was it. Social interation came in the form of a ‘beamed’ mini clip that came out of the belly and involved human children opening with a ‘eh oh’ or a seriously ridiculous dance that was a form of communicating to the purple, yellow, line green and red beast foursome.

I remember a time when the theme song actually made the top10 during the Christmas of 1998. Kids would buy the merchandise which fueled profits and the show just kept going on and on and on and on and on (and you get the point!). The English language was facing its greatest threat after the founding of the US. The Teletubbies. Children across the UK and all over the World (thank you Satellite!) were chiming ‘eh ohs’ and wobbling around pretending to be fetching tubby toast! Marks and Sparks even got in the act with their own branded ‘tubby toast’! The World hit tubby mania.

Then came the mobile texting phenomenon. ill c u l8r pr Eng Lang. Stdents al ova da UK nd da wrld nw hd an eng lvl of zero as grmr and spellin hit their wrst lvls in 100 yrs. Mre skool drp outs nd cases of thumb diseases broke out.

Then the popularity of the net soared! With that came all forms of user generated content and new words such as lol and rofl became kings of the day, woot! The English language broke into two new main streams, netlish (a rather more sophisticated form of texting language but still pants) and gamers speak. Pwnded!

Today, the children we love and want to bring up are under serious threat as the World fails to recognise that sitting children in front of multi colored ‘puff’ girls beating the living daylights out of bacteria doesn’t really give an ‘educational’ benefit.

I want to ask you, dear reader, one question.

What would you do if your son wanted to be buttercup?