by Sarah Cope
The BBC’s In The Night Garden has enjoyed huge success in recent years, taking over where Teletubbies left off as the programme of choice for pre-schoolers. With its gentle music and simple plots, and colourful and sometimes bizarre visuals, it was easy to see the appeal. It was also obvious that a live show would be a money-spinner, and with tickets priced starting at £14, rising to over £25 for premium seating, it has turned out to be just that.
The Brent Cross Showdome, as it turns out, is a huge inflatable venue, which was rather like being inside the intestines of the Michelin Man, if you’d care to imagine that. It was hard not to resent the extremely aggressive marketing of toys, sweets and fizzy drinks when ticket prices were already so steep (ushers bring trays of them into the auditorium so there’s no escape), and my advice to parents would be to take along healthy snacks and a toy or two to distract your rampant little consumer and hopefully save you some money!
When the show began, I was interested to see whether the two four-year-olds I had brought along would be entranced or whether they would be far too sophisticated for the show, the television version of which my daughter has recently started to call “too babyish for me.”
Things didn’t get off to a good start when the scenery – a big book structure – began to fall apart in the first minute and had to be hastily held together by stagehands. Again, with tickets costing so much I’d have hoped such hiccups could have been avoided.
There’s not much to keep parents occupied here, unlike with some kid’s shows which cleverly try – and sometimes even succeed – in appealing to everyone in the audience. There’s lots of visual stimuli, but the plot is thin – kind of like Mad Men, then, but with a lot less smoking.
However, the character Iggle Piggle’s uncanny resemblance to David Cameron led me to view the show as a clever political allegory.
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