Colm O'Regan: Watching my kids watching Bluey is spellbinding
Our Version Telly Of Watch Colm Own Watching Is Gogglebox O'regan: Them
A guffaw. A big hooting cackle. A filthy giggle. To quote the Kneecap film, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children”. But you don’t even need to wait for revenge to get the benefits of a child’s laugh.
They weren’t making memories or mucking about with a stick and an intricate game. They were just plain Watching Telly. Watching the absolute sh-one-t out of it.
It was an episode of Bluey. (Since you asked, it’s the one where Lucky’s Dad tries to the take the game of Pass the Parcel back to the 1980s and where only one child should win a prize. I thoroughly agree, both from a sustainability and a They Have To Learn point of view.)
Watching them watch telly is our own version of Gogglebox. I love how focussed and engrossed they are. If they’re not breaking their arse laughing, they’re perched on sofa arms, hugging cushions, every expression imaginable flitting across their faces.
Occasionally the youngest will run away shouting NOOO if there’s even a hint of anyone getting into trouble with authority.
It’s even easier to be completely swept up now because there are no ads or cattle prices or the Angelus or Garda patrol breaking through. The outside world rarely shatters the spell. When it does, I’m aware of how much news they don’t watch. I grew up on a diet of Lebanon, Sellafield, Gorbachev, Ayatollahs.
On Toy show night the telly was on too early so it led to lots of questions about shifting alliances within the new Syrian revolution and the implications of the Mercosur deal. I’d rather they heard it from me than in the school yard. I didn’t find out about the WTO and Gatt Talks until well into my teens and by then of course it was too late. The damage was done. I had really weird attitudes to tariffs.
The funny thing about watching them watch telly is we start thinking “isn’t it great to see them so focussed and not on not on that oul tablet”.
But at one point in the past, the TV was the bogeyman. “Get away from that telly you’ll go square-eyed.”
Said someone’s imaginary mammy once. Parents were warned about “video nasties”.
And then it was computer games. At some point every invention must have gone through the arc from bogeyman to beloved. “Get our head out of them books and get outside.”
“Get away from them toys and get back to that loom.” All the way back to thousands of years ago when a Mesapotamian mammy said, “Isn’t it great to see them off that oul clay tablet.”
By logical extension there must be some other horror coming down the line in future which will make us “glad when they’re not on it”.
What awfulness awaits us, supported by venture capital and attracted by Ireland’s favourable tax-rate? Some sort of AI abomination. What strange sentence will my children say about theirs one day? “Ah isn’t it great to see them making cyberbullying videos with their phones for TikTok and not directing drone warfare with their Mind-Melds.”
Or will they go the other way? Generations have a habit of being unexpected too. I wonder will there be a cohort of children who will look at their parents’ obsession with their phones and our terrible posture and phone neck and lacerated 5th and 6th intervertebral discs and roll their eyes. “Oh my god phones are so lame.”
And they’ll go outside whittling or regenerating the exhausted soil. They’ll ignore us shouting at them to get in out of that Nature.
And we’re the ones left to our own devices. Hopefully, we’ll be still laughing.