CBEEBIES: The Dystopian Limbo Of Bing, And Other Theories

I wasn’t planning on doing another Cbeebies post so soon.  But since the last post, where we mentioned Bing only in passing, my wife and friends have put forward their theories about his parentage.

Then a Den Of Geek article last Thursday was solely devoted to the subject.  Obviously this is a hot topic, and it can’t be long before the scandal orientated tabloids will be knocking on Flop’s door, demanding the truth.

But who is Bing?  Bing is a loud and large rabbit, with a penchant for red checked dungarees and being a pain in the hole.  He has several friends of different species, who are roughly the same age and roughly the same size.  Sula, for instance, is an elephant, but is quite happy to play with Bing instead of trampling him underfoot because they take the same size in trousers.

Bing and his friends are analogous to toddlers.  They have parent figures - Bing’s is called Flop.  Flop is the real star of the show as far as parents are concerned, because he manages to solve Bing’s most recent meltdown so calmly - suavely even.  

A usual Bing plot is that Bing is playing with one of his friends (Sula seems to be a regular victim), or maybe just hanging out with Flop; something goes wrong for Bing, whether it’s that he lost at a game, or found out someone is better at doing something than he is, or they’ve not got food he likes in for tea; Flop patiently explains to Bing, in a very calm voice, why he’s behaving like an arse and what he can do to improve; happiness prevails.  The episode alway ends with Flop saying “[episode subject matter] - it’s a Bing thing!”  This means that a lot of seemingly everyday things are actually Bing things, including shadows, ice creams and growing.  Maybe the show is trying to claim everything that exists is Bing’s, step by step.

Flop has extraordinarily good parenting skills, especially with patience like his, and is an excellent role model for young Bing.  The reason why Bing’s parentage is of such curiosity is that Flop is a small orange soft toy about a quarter of the size of his charge.  And what takes this out of the realms of curiosity and into the land of very odd indeed is that every single animal in Bing’s town has a similar parent figure.  

Flop is definitely, in no shape or form, a rabbit (or any other sort of animal).  My longstanding pet theory is that he is, but in the land where Bing is set, children just happen to look like animals until they reach adulthood - when Bing becomes an adult he will overnight turn into something rather like Flop (it’s heartening to see that this exact theory was endorsed by the Den of Geek post).  My wife’s theory is that Bing and all of his friends are in foster care, and that the town is essentially a foster town, with altruistic bean bags taking on animal children from broken homes.

After posting the previous post, which wasn’t even about Bing, several theories from friends came forth on Facebook, including:

“Bing exists in a dystopian limbo in which young animals with learning difficulties are banished to be cared for by pastel-coloured knitted golems.”

“I've always seen Flop and his ilk as social workers or foster carers, but then coco's equivalent appears to be a very busy business 'woman', dumping them on anyone that'll take them, doesn't even say hi or thanks to flop for babysitting. Rude.”

“I've spoke to [my daughter] about it, and she very much thinks that Flop is Bing's dad. “

The Den Of Geek article covers several of the above theories and several others (and the internet at large has even more).  It’s obviously a matter of growing national concern, and it’s only a matter of time before the heavyweight journalists get involved and bring us the truth.  Unless Flop is bribing them to keep his story safe.

However all of this parentage stuff is a bit of a distraction from the main issue I have with the problem which is that Bing is an insanely irritating character.  He has an extremely whiney voice, and almost anything he says is bound to annoy me - but the worst is in the title sequence, where he trips, Flop says “are you alright Bing?” and he replies “yuh-hu-uh!”.  I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does.  It’s probably the lack of basic vocabulary - I expect more from a cartoon toddler rabbit on the BBC.  But as a character he is also very prone to being selfish and just always has to be the centre of attention - he’s very much a drama queen.  If I owned a rabbit like that, I’d probably try to give him up for adoption to a bean bag creature myself.

In closing, it should be noted that my son cares considerably less about Bing than I do.

Spot The Celebrity Voice - Mark Rylance (yes, RSC trained, Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance) as Flop.  The first celebrity voice I noticed on Cbeebies, it blew my mind how many famous actors were on the channel at first.  These days it seems odd if I don’t recognise any names at all.

TV: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall - Bewitching, brilliant - and that’s just what the continuity announcers said.

There’s been a lot of praise for the BBC series of Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, and it’s been extremely popular - according to a recent Guardian article it is the most popular drama since the modern ratings system began.  So why didn’t I get it?

"But did I leave the gas on or not?"

I tried reading the book of Wolf Hall a couple of years ago to see what the fuss was about, and found it really hard to get into - so hard that I didn’t in fact get into it and got distracted by something else.  I found it quite dry and boring, (which surprised me because I’m interested in the Tudor era in history and liked learning about the story at school).  Although technically it was still on my ‘things to finish’ list, it was way down. 

But I had the same thing with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - a bestseller that I’d found hard to get into but saw the film, and saw the light.  Seeing the film made me go back and reread the books and recognise that there was something I’d missed.  So I settled down to the dramatisation of Wolf Hall bearing that in mind, and you know what?

Well - it was a bit dry and boring… wasn’t it?

I was disappointed all over again.  I was being told this was ‘the new I, Clavdivs’ in the papers and most friends and colleagues seemed to really be enjoying it. too  The ratings seem to prove I’m wrong.  Everyone says that Mark Rylance was brilliant whereas I thought it looked like he sleepwalked through it with one expression (a man having a long and quizzical senior moment) before finally coming alive in the sixth episode.  Damian Lewis was admittedly brilliant as a charming and menacing Henry VIII.  Jonathan Pryce and Anton Lesser were well cast as Wolsey and Thomas More respectively.  And it all looked very authentic (whatever that actually means) in that Beeb Costume Drama way.  But the story seemed surprisingly divorced from emotion somehow - it showed other people’s emotions being enacted on screen but failed to inspire any in me.  I guess I was hoping to see something along the same lines as a Tudor House of Cards or The Thick Of It, a behind the scenes view of an arch-manipulator at work.  But we didn’t see that much of Thomas Cromwell’s Machiavellian skills until the end.  Instead of seeing ‘under-the-hood’ of Tudor politics, each episode seemed like walking in on a  series half-way through despite having been watching them all - you know, in order and everything.

So then I tried to enjoy it as a drama about Thomas Cromwell - The Man.  But with Rylance looking either mournful or like he’d forgotten to feed the cat I didn’t care enough about him.  And he doesn’t have that exciting a private life anyway - apart from a sequence in the first episode where his wife and daughter are killed by a fever, and a few other scenes here and there (he nearly gets off with Anne Boleyn’s sister, for instance) there’s not much to it.  Or rather, his private life and his political life were completely entwined.  

I, Clavdivs worked by taking a fairly marginal character (until his unexpected crowning as Emperor) and allow us to see events and characters through his eyes (although when it was dramatised Derek Jacobi managed to imbue the TV Claudius with liveliness and charm).  But the balance was all wrong in Wolf Hall - it felt to me we were seeing Cromwell’s life at the expense of seeing events build.  It felt like there were scenes missing that had been replaced with trivialities.  And the I, Clavdivs historical drama model doesn’t fit Wolf Hall in the end because Cromwell wasn’t by any means marginal - he was pivotal to the politics of Henry VIII’s court during this period.  

Wolf Hall also an intensely humourless production, bursting with a sense of the emotionally arid and dull.  A story that by rights should be very varied had exactly the same story arc for an entire three individual episodes (The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey; The Fall of Thomas More; The Fall of Anne Boleyn).  The sixth episode came alive (by comparison to the previous five at any rate); we saw Rylance absolutely take command and finally show the audience why his character has a fearsome reputation. 

Mark Gatiss wasn't very good either

Apart from a few forgettable one-off scenes in previous episodes, menacing relatively minor characters, we’d not seen evidence of him actually doing Henry’s dirty work.  Well ‘show don’t tell’ is a cliche, but like all cliches there’s some truth in it, and having people tell us that Cromwell has a fearsome reputation but not showing us why (until so late in the game) made for drama lacking in drama.  

I hated not liking Wolf Hall, because I was really looking forward to it.  Maybe I am missing out on what the biggest BBC2 audience of all time found in it, but I’m going to blame Wolf Hall and not myself for missing something this time round.