Tish Tash, Pif Paf Pof: Eurovision and Talking Bears
Finally, an edition of this newsletter written after ambassadorial pastries
I join you from deepest Belgravia where I have been having breakfast at the Austrian Embassy and talking about one of the highlights of my year: Eurovision. So Square Eyes is short and sweet today, because for one week only, I’m all about grown-up television (I was going to write adult, but…)
You can read my preview, published in Politico, right here. I never thought I'd get to type the words “pyrotechnic jorts catapult” in a serious publication, but such are the gifts the EBU brings us. The first semi-final was on Tuesday night, and Poland didn’t get through, despite their magnificent chess-themed ode to the moon, so check it out here.
I was going to put a link in here to ‘Pif Paf Pof’ the best fake Eurovision entry ever (yes, better than ‘My Lovely Horse’ and the Will Ferrell movie, though both of these are also excellent!) but now I find out I am so old, and it is so old, it’s not even on YouTube? It’s from The High Life, a 90s BBC2 sitcom with Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson. Why isn’t it on iPlayer?
(Editor’s note: yes, we desperately need a campaign to get The High Life on iPlayer.)
Anyway, ahead of Saturday, enjoy these housekeeping messages. First of all: Dear Paid Subscribers. THANK YOU for subscribing. I am eternally grateful. I know that as part of the deal, you get to pick a show for me to critique. This will happen… eventually. I promise I am not the Caroline Calloway of kids’ TV newsletters. Anyway, I’ve only made it to Central London, not the Maldives (I need a few more of you to pay for that, TBH). But what I failed to factor in when I made this promise was that I need to take time to watch these shows with the girls, and… they will not stop watching Tish Tash.
Tish Tash is a South Korean-British-Filipino-Singaporean co-production about a family of talking bears. Tish, the daughter, has an imaginary friend called Tash, who helps her and younger brother Bobby negotiate such challenges as piano practice, maths homework and dealing with her favourite comic being discontinued. It is extremely pretty; the whole thing looks like it was drawn on stained glass. The mum is voiced by the hilarious Frog Stone – a fellow twin mum – and consistently cracks me up.
I do not know why my children love Tish Tash quite so much. We watch each episode again and again. I can basically quote the one where they encounter a stinky hockey sock snake under the bed by heart. If I had to guess, I think it’s because Tash keeps blurring the line between reality and fantasy to solve problems and explain things, while they are at a stage where developmentally, the dividing line between the two is just hardening up. With school, the real world, and boring mummy explaining why we have to take the bus, perhaps your imaginary friend with a flying taxi is increasingly taking the back seat.
Is it maybe the same as the way we look at old photos of ourselves: smiling, chilled, enjoying a cheeky glass of fizz while the sun glitters on the Mediterranean sea. Yeah, we know it was our lived reality once, but now, hello random back pain, NHS text messages about blood pressure checks and never-ending life admin. I (barely) exaggerate, but you get the idea: perhaps Tish and her imaginary friend are so entertaining because they show viewers that now they can solve their own problems at the wise and august age of five?
Whatever it is, they love it, it’s short (five minutes, yessss), and the family talk through things together and end up in a good place (like Bluey). The only real count against it is that Bobby, the little brother, shouts “NEVER!!!!” when he doesn't want to do something and your children, like mine, may copy it. It NEVERRRR!! gets old. For them.
Final thought this week (not even that short now, sorry) is to say a massive thank you for my new photos. The extremely talented Eleanor Howarth (nursery mum friend) took them, and my twin mum friend Hannah did my make-up. Thank you! Hooray for mum friends. And thank you to Tom Phillips for carefully arranging the punctuation I scatter over these like poppyseeds on sourdough.
The second Eurovision semi is on tonight and includes my favourite this year, The Netherlands. The final, as ever, is on Saturday night. I keep trying to leave Twitter as it’s become so awful, but I’ll probably end up sharing some thoughts here. In the meantime, do me a massive favour and… tell other people about this if you like it!