Newsround, and other childhood TV programmes that could f**k off

WATCHING kids’ TV with an orange barley water was the high point of your childhood. But for every Scooby-Doo there was a lot of stuff you hated. Like these shows…

Screen Test

Dull film quiz, the highlight of which was a kid sending in a crappy film they’d made. Would your tightarse dad buy you a cine camera? Would he f**k, and that’s the sole reason why you aren’t a top director banging Kate Beckinsale. A waste of airtime that could have been devoted to high-quality fare like Space Sentinels.

Newsround

Being aimed at kids, it was naturally a bit bland, with no politics but lots of uncontroversial news such as frigid pandas, an RAF helicopter delivering a dialysis machine or British climbers scaling Everest. Basically what today’s adult BBC news will be like after a few more years of the Tories.

Jackanory

After a hard day at school, more f**king books. And for some reason it always seemed to be Johnny Briggs and his uninteresting gold belt. You’d have put on more Battle of the Planets. That had a proper story, albeit the same one every week as Zoltar built an unnecessarily stylised robot to conquer Earth. Maybe he should have streamlined production to missiles and tanks instead of a ‘space terrapin’.

Button Moon

ITV decided what kids of the 80s wanted was a kitchen utensil-themed show with cheap, jerky string puppets that made Muffin the Mule look like The Empire Strikes Back. To give some idea of the paucity of ambition, the main character had spoons for arms and was called Mr Spoon.

Ivor the Engine

In a fictional part of Wales so stereotypical it was practically racist, Ivor the Barely-Animated Engine did nothing very interesting. With other toss like Ludwig and Willo the Wisp in the same end-of-kids’-TV slot, it’s hard not reach the conclusion that the BBC was telling you: ‘You’ve had your fun, sunshine, now f**k off and let your dad watch TV.’

Why Don’t You?

… fill your life with crap to keep you occupied during the school holidays? This was the nefarious purpose of the show, so you wasted hours doing things like splitting the end of a matchstick and adding a drop of washing-up liquid to make a ‘speedboat’, which at least taught you a valuable lesson about life being full of disappointment.

Boyfriend unknowingly undergoing six-month relationship appraisal

UNBEKNOWNST to him, a woman’s boyfriend is being evaluated on the skills and conduct he has demonstrated in the relationship so far.

Charlotte Phelps decided to carry out a review of boyfriend Joshua Hudson’s performance in the role as her future life partner by assessing areas including emotional availability, hygiene and willingness to put up with her shit.

Charlotte said: “Josh is doing okay at some things, such as attendance and replying to questions with more than one syllable, but there are some areas for improvement.

“Even though he said in the interview – first date, sorry – that he’s very spontaneous, he was clearly upset when I suggested we go out one night instead of him playing FIFA again.

“And his attentiveness could use some work given he hasn’t a clue why I’ve been asking him pointedly how he thinks loading the dishwasher just went or to rate our sex life on a scale of 1 to 10.

“I think I’ll put him on probation by being weird and distant for the next three months to see if he figures out what’s wrong. If he fails, he will be dismissed following a harrowing exit interview and a lot of highly critical feedback.

“Love is wonderful, but if the stakeholder doesn’t deliver on the actionable points, he must be terminated.”