|
| Foocha! is a non-profit Web site. We do it for kicks, not for cash. If you're interested in writing for the site, click here |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F4
|
|
| |
| |
|
Ahh – when you’re grown-up, with a job and drinking habit, you’re never going to find yourself watching kid’s TV again. Shame. No more sensitive children’s dramas, import cartoons, or Blue Peter. No more educational shows. Double shame. But if you’re really lucky, or really lazy, you can catch the opening barrage of morning programming that runs from 9am onwards on BBC2. Most of it is pretty lame, a lot of animated history shows, and programs about understanding teenage growing pains. But there’s always diamonds in the rough to watch at this unsociable time, and ‘Cat’s Eyes’ is one of those shiny stones.
I used to catch only little clips of this before, and it never made any sense – in the nicest possible way. For one thing it’s got Roland Rivron in it, and I thought he was dead or married to that woman from Transvsion Vamp or something. And then there’s these two puppet cats, who just seem to spend the whole time moaning. And a jolly girl who Roland is always mooning over. Somewhere amongst all this is the educational stuff – but it’s not shoved in your face, which makes a change in this sort of stuff. It segues effortlessly from a scene where the cat’s have stuffed a prawn in Roland’s torch ( so he gets scared every time he turns it on ) to an explanation of how light works. I actually learned something that totally passed me by at O-level. A cat has succeeded where Mrs Price had failed. Fancy that.
All the monkeying around is ladled up with just the right level of enthusiastic oddness - not too weak to be boring, and not too overplayed to be irritating and contrived. Very rarely does anyone pull this stunt off, and the writers of ‘Cat’s Eyes’ have definitely studied their Johnny Ball tapes. Definitely worth bunking off work for.
BBC2 9.15am Mon-Fri
Top Home |
|
|
|
|
