Canny Minds Blog

BBC gives nursery rhymes a fairytale ending

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Jenny in Articles, Children

The BBC has been accused of tinkering with traditional nursery rhymes to give them happy endings to avoid upsetting children.

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 edition of Something Special, aimed at children with special needs but popular with under-fives, included a version of Humpty Dumpty 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, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, who watched the show with his sons aged five and three, described the reworked version as “pathetic”.

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

In his latest blog post, and with more than a hint of sarcasm, Mr Harris railed against what he sees as the excesses of political correctness. He wrote: “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 judgements.”

Mr Harris added: “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 arachnophobe 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 said was for “creative” reasons and not to sanitise the rhymes.

A spokesman pointed out that the nursery rhymes in their original form were maintained in full of the CCBeebies 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 that being creative and entertaining.”

Meanwhile, the children’s favourite Noddy will return later this month in his first official new book for more than 45 years.

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

The book Noddy and the Farmyard Muddlehas been written by Sophie Smallwood, 39, who is the granddaughter of Noddy’s creator, Enid Blyton.

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

Written by Paul Stokes, The Daily Telegraph, 19th October 2009

Photo courtesy of Wavecult

Tags: 0-5, Children, Learn Something New, Literature, male and female, nursery rhymes