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Attack of the seven-foot children - The Guardian, 21 February 2001

Kids' TV favourites the Tweenies are coming to a town near you.  Hide your wallet, says Catherine Bennett.

What are they?  Any non-parents reading this page for kicks may need an introduction.  The Tweenies are four adult-sized creatures: two male, two female, with big feet and a blobby head resembling a cross between a tyrannosaurus rex and a moppet.

What do they do?  They provide 'a thought provoking, enriching and enjoyable experience" for the under-fives.  Or that's what the BBC Tweenies website claims.  Every morning, on BBC2, the four little monster-toddlers hang out in an other-worldly playgroup, where they are cared for by a pair of older Tweenies, a faintly sinister Tweenie-geezer called Max and a more matronly minder, Judy.  There is also a dog called Doodles.  In squeaky, pretend-childish voices, they sing and play, dance and learn things about the world.

Fizz and Bella, Jake and Milo have awoken profound passions in the pre-school generation.  Where three-year-olds meet and exchange views, Tweenie-preference is now considered quite as revealing of character as favourite colour.  The selection of, say, Fizz, would generally held to be a more promising indicator than that of the unspeakable Bella; while any child opting for Max would be, one feels, as much a source of perplexity to her peers as if she had expressed a preference for mud-brown.

Although the programme may strike more sensitive viewers as repellently raucous, the improving content and overall harmlessness of the Tweenie world has converted many parents, who were therefore the softest of touches when it was announced that the Tweenies would be touring 'live', all round the country.  If the show was related to the enriching BBC programmes then it could not be wholly meretricious.  And even if it was at Wembley, Tweenies Live! was, like chickenpox, the sort of childhood affliction that would only have to be lived through once.  Off we went.

The show did turn out to be quite stimulating, mathematically.  It was extraordinary how the figures added up.  You started with the price of the ticket: say, £11.50 for a not very good seat (minus booking fee), like ours.  Then, with the merchandising stalls everywhere, you had to spend at least £4 on a programme (a folded promotional poster) and £5 on the cheapest possible flashing wand (luxury versions £9).  To say nothing of the popcorn and T-shirts, rucksacks and scarves.  So if you took £20 as a conservative average cost per child, multiplied it by, say, 5,000 (Wembley Arena holds 11,000), then that's £100,000 made just from the children in the audience, without even beginning to include the costs of their escorts.  At Wembley, they were doing up to three Tweenies Live! shows a day, so that's £300,000 a day, from the children alone.  Which added up to a mystery: where had all the money gone?

Not, manifestly, on the show, which amounted to little more than the six Tweenie costumes plus dog costume, each containing an unknown actor, strutting and squeaking through a few song-and-dance routines.  The mainstay of the production was a triptych of giant screens, whose crude inserts and graphics were presumably meant to compensate for the shortage of props, economy of cast and a catastrophic sound system that rendered even the most rudimentary dialogue unintelligible.

In the absence of a narrative, the principal dramatic device was to remove the Tweenies from view, so that all the tinies began asking anxiously where they had gone, then, after a while, to make them come back.  The greedy cynics who threw this shambles together seem to have decided, no doubt correctly, that adulation of the Tweenies is now so far advanced that the mere sight of the foursome in various permutations will satisfy their audience.  So the sight of the foursome albeit from a great distance was what they offered.  To be fair, the Tweenies did occasionally invite their audience to dance along with them: a form of participation which was not, alas, possible, for anyone except children sitting within nappy-throwing distance of the stage and would have been positively suicidal for many others sitting higher up.

For most of the tots, glued to their parents' laps, or half trapped in the grip of an adult-size folding seat, the spectacle of the remote, squawking Tweenies going up and down through holes in an empty stage was considered excitement enough.  Or too much excitement by half.

Other impresarios may be heartened to hear that, if your stars are big enough, you can entertain the audience of Wembley Arena with nothing more than the promise of a story and a few dressing-up clothes.

The highlight was the massed singing of the Colchester classic, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (waving any £5 flashing wands that had not already broken), though it seemed a shame this was one of the episodes of Tweenie-rationing, so we had to sing along with creepy old Max.  Those who like loud bangs were rewarded at the end of the show, when the Tweenies disappeared in the one prop that must have set them back more than a tenner: the Green Tweenie rocket, on which, of a morning, they soar into view.  Pure, theatrical Calpol.

The parents in my party conceded that the children had enjoyed it, in a notably muted kind of way.  Then again, as one of the mothers said, 'They would like anything.'  The presentation of various bits of Tweenie junk probably added to the children's enjoyment.  Among the adults in our row, the mood was less benign.  It is not altogether comfortable to sit and watch tiny children having their trust and intelligence insulted.  And anyway, we were bored.  For all its enormous profits and its claims to be 'improving', Tweenies Live! contrived to offer less than any other children's spectacle we could think of, from the local pantomime to the travelling circus, from the humblest puppet theatre to the elaborate stunts of Disney on Ice even, someone muttered, to the acrobatics at the Dome.  Making money from Tweenie lovers is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

And, as BBC Worldwide is still discovering, so much more rewarding.

THE GUARDIAN, 21 February 2001