Big Cook Little Cook

Roughly two years ago, I was happily oblivious to CBeebies. Most people without kids are. For the benefit of those fortunate individuals, CBeebies is a BBC television station filled with programmes for the young. We are talking Teletubbies, Balamory and The Tweenies here.

My daughter discovered CBeebies when she was recovering from chicken pox last winter. The poor thing had a high fever and itchy skin and she was too unwell to play. Watching television or the odd song/game on the CBeebies website seemed a harmless enough thing to do. She watched maybe half an hour twice a day - we were controlling it and she seemed happy. The downside was that as soon as she got better, she wanted to watch CBeebies ALL THE TIME.

Luckily it doesn't take much effort to persuade a toddler to want to read books and play silly games, especially when Playdoh and fingerpaint are involved. Still, we have watched some of these shows, purely in the name of (ahem) research.

On the whole the BBC aren't doing too bad a job spending the licence fee. Balamory is a fantastic show, featuring just enough catchy music and sexual tension between PC Plum and Miss Hoolie to keep this sleep deprived dad more than happy. The back-chat between Tigs, Mukka and Dogsby on The Shiny Show is a minor masterpiece of surreal farce. And the Noo Noo on the Teletubbies is obviously the brains of that operation.

However, one show is just so piss poor that my frontal cortex tries to half throttle me to prevent any unnecessary agony. The premise of 'Big Cook Little Cook' isn't necessarily a bad one - get kids to want to cook and eat healthy food. However, the execution of the show is just... awful. There are two cooks who run a cafe. One is normal sized and is called Ben. The other one is approximately 20cm tall and is cruelly named 'Small'. Apparently they run 'the best cafe in town'. You could have fooled me.

They can only serve one customer at a time, inevitably some poor sod from a nursery rhyme. When they eventually get round to serving them after singing songs, telling stories and generally mucking about, they produce fussy, terrifyingly god-awful nouvelle cuisine. For example, if they were entertaining Mother Goose, she would be presented with an egg on toast decorated with two black olives (eyes?), a sliver of red pepper (mouth?) and something random made out of fruit (wings?). I'm not sure what children are supposed to make of this. No parent would ever actually volunteer to make this stuff, with or without the 'help' of a passing child.

Anyway, this is not the worst thing about the show. Oh no. The actors who play Small and Ben are obviously doing it for the money after realising that their day job (stand up comedy double act) wasn't keeping them in day-glo undies. Every day they grind through this show, singing the same rubbish songs, saying the same lame catchphrases, grinning empty eyed at the camera and they haven't even got the decency to send themselves up. And my daughter loves this show! Arrrggghhhhh!

And it would have been so easy to make this show great. Julian Clary should play an even camper Ben, preferably after exhuming his old Joan Collins Fan Club wardrobe. Imagine what he could do with 'And remember, the oven is hot hot hot!' Jack Dee would make a fantastic world-weary Small. I can see him now whizzing around on that wooden spoon telling Ben to get his own bloody butter.

Ah. Dream on.