BBC gives nursery rhymes a fairytale ending

chris

According to recent broadcasts, Humpty Dumpty was not irreparably damaged in his great fall and Little Miss Muffet has no particular fear of spiders.

The examples have been picked up in recent programmes on the network's CBeebies children's channel.

Last Friday's Something Special, aimed at children with special needs but popular with all under-fives, included a singalong feature in which the lyrics were changed.

Instead of all the King's horses and all the King's men being unable to put him together again, they "made Humpty happy again".

Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South, who watched the show with his sons aged five and three, described the re-worked version as "pathetic".

He was also critical of a previous episode of Big Cook Little Cook in which Little Miss Muffet welcomes a spider that sits down beside her.

Mr Harris said: "For goodness sake. Obviously children will find it far too violent, distressing and horrific that Humpty should not be put back together again. This is what happens when adults try to make these kinds of judgments."

He highlights the cases in his latest internet blog in which he rails against he sees as the excesses of political correctness.

Mr Harris says: "So CBeebies rewrite well-known nursery rhymes and fairy tales so that Humpty Dumpty "is happy again" rather than being left shattered and at the mercy of surgically incompetent horses.

"And Little Miss Muffet, the most famous arachnaphobe in children's literature, befriends the spider instead of getting her father to swish it with a newspaper.

The BBC defended its decision to change the words which it says was for "creative" reasons and not to sanitise the rhymes.

A spokeswoman pointed out that the nursery rhymes in their original form were maintained in full on the CBeebies website.

She said: "We play nursery rhymes with their original lyrics all the time and the small change to Humpty Dumpty was done for no other reason than being creative and entertaining."

In an unrelated twist, the children's old favourite Noddy will return to Toyland later this month in his first official new book for over 45 years.

But there will be no mention of the golliwogs, black-faced woollen dolls, which featured in his previous adventures, to avoid controversy.

The book Noddy and the Farmyard Muddle has been written by Sophie Smallwood, 39, a teacher from West Sussex, who is the granddaughter of Noddy's creator Enid Blyton.

She considered including the golliwogs, but decided against it because the characters now have connotations that did not exist when Noddy was first written in 1949.

The word sparked controversy this year when Carol Thatcher was sacked from BBC television's The One Show after using it off-air to describe a mixed-race tennis player.

Source:telegraph