Oopsy daisy - Hasbro's heroine pales in comparison
The BAFTA award-winning "In the Night Garden", known fondly to many parents and under-fives in the UK and beyond, is the jewel in the crown of the BBC's pre-school programming, playing daily on the CBeebies digital TV channel in living rooms and nurseries up and down the country.
For some it is the modern successor to Playschool and Playbus (and even shares the same creative team, Ragdoll Productions, as the much-maligned Teletubbies) and it features the narration of none other than ever-dependable British luvvie Sir Derek Jacobi CBE. In fact, many may be left wondering why the BBC doesn't put quite so many resources into its prime-time programming for grown-ups (the answer may well be down to merchandising, but we'll come to that in a moment).
As a parent myself, I ritually watch this programme (with my daughter I hasten to add) during the lead-up to her bedtime. However, it was only recently that I noticed how one of the show's main characters, a pull-chord wannabe prima balerina called Upsy Daisy, appears to have been suffering from a skin colour crisis rivalling even that of the late great Michael Jackson himself. Let me explain further with a bit of help from my mobile phone's camera.
The upper picture here is taken directly by my phone from our television screen (apologies Aunty if this breaks any copyright laws); the bottom image is of the official Hasbro merchandise of the very same Upsy Daisy character, freely available from toy shops and even supermarkets (I believe ours was bought in a Tesco's in Cambridge last summer).
It would appear as though the journey from the Night Garden all the way to the High Street has clearly been a stressful one for poor old Upsy as she has tragically lost almost all traces of her on-screen dark-skinned colouring. Or perhaps she is simply missing her onscreen best buddy, the (miraculously unaffected by any such skin tone shifts) bright blue teddy bear, Igglepiggle.
So what's really going on?
Now, let's be clear here - BBC Worldwide and Hasbro make an enormous amount of money from the merchandise off of the back of In the Night Garden - in fact, the toy and game licence is worth more than even the likes of Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine, selling on average 4 plush toys every minute since launch [*] . Hasbro make toys under licence for many leading children's brands and my instinct is to assume that they would almost certainly have a conscious commercial justification for feeling the need to give Upsy her paler off-screen complexion, however much they might beg to differ.
In fact, back in January 2009, after complaints raised to the BBC [*] about the lightness of Upsy Daisy's skin colour in toy form, Hasbro had their knuckles rapped and were told to make her toy manifestation more representative of the figure portrayed in the television programme. But based on the evidence of the toys currently on sale, including the one that my daughter recently received, Upsy Daisy is still an awfully long way from looking anything like her onscreen-self once again.
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