In the Night Garden began airing in Canada this week. I'm not sure why, but something about it and its odd and hard to place melancholia resonates with me, and I can't seem to watch it without my face getting wet. (Maybe it's just Derek Jacobi's narration, and the way he sings "Yes my name is Iggle Piggle")
In the Night Garden - Surreal Landscape of Nostalgia
The stars seem to blister like burning film as they open into pink flowers. The night sky segways into the blossom on a cherry tree, and we follow the falling petals and see a group of characters hopping and waving in a bandstand surrounded by woods.
This is the psychedelic opening sequence of In the Night Garden, the recent under fours TV show. The scene apparently represents the shifts into dream state, and it's the most beautiful and surprising cosmic screen scene since Dave Bowmans journey through 2001s slit-scan landscapes. In both we go 'through' the sky into an alternate reality.
This particular alternate reality comes from Anne Wood and Andy Davenport of RagDoll, co- creators of the Teletubbies, and bona fide auters of kids TV in era of poorly animated, pre-teen-plotlined, ham-fisted edutainment.
In the Night Garden is by contrast, quiet, calm, with an atmosphere of sadness that is out of kilter with the upbeat rictus grin of most kid-fodder. And it is intentionally so. Wood explains their motivation: "We became very aware of the anxiety surrounding the care of young children which manifested itself in all kind of directions - but the one big subject that came up again and again was bedtime. It's the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed... so this is a programme about calming things down whereas most children's TV is about gee-ing everything up!"
...
Maybe nostalgia is a significant way of faking a sensation of love - and all media, just like its creators wants to be loved. It tugs at the heart strings and moistens our eyes with a tenderness that certainly feels authentic. It hijacks our fear of the future and provides a haven for the ache for other places and other times.
Though it may feel part of us - even welded to our core - these are often memories of externally provided images rather than internal experiences. They've been formed after the event, by consensus and communicated to us through media. Nostalgia is often as impersonal as the memories of the Nexus-6 replicant Rachel in Blade Runner. There are semi-memories that we've learnt from family Super 8 films, from endlessly repeated clips, and a media in constant state of historical revisionism. Never before has so much information been available with instant recall. The dividing line between our own memory and the capture and cataloguing of time that digital technology has allowed.
Its effect is so powerful - beyond logic or argument - that it is hard to see whether nostalgia is a subject or object, a technique or a mode of operation. Perhaps, like drunks hell bent on another shot, we're addicted to the sensation overpowering us and delivering us into oblivion.
If this means living in a world which will edge ever closer to In the Night Garden, I'm all for it. The idea that amateurish craft and high technology might reside in reverberating synthesised harmony, that genre splicing and scale hopping might become a way of life, and that giant inflatable good-natured things will wander the streets, I'm all for it. Maybe - finally cut loose from an outmoded 19th century idea of progress - we'll find ourselves liberated and excitedly repeating our names over and over again because nothing more need be said.
http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archiv ... ght_ga.php
