We had a Pippi Longstocking month last month.
Bit of a departure for F. If she sees real people on the telly, she usually wrinkles her nose up and denounces them as being a 'mummy program', by which she means Dr. Phil, CSI Denver or whatever other generic daytime crap is chuntering on in the background while V does something else entirely.
But Pippi somehow passed this acid test, and we had several marathons of watching all of it back to back. And singing the theme song, which is now a bedtime staple. V called F 'my little firecracker' the other morning. "Ne-Hej!" said F loudly and angrily, as she does if you call her anything other than her proper name or do anything before she's told you to do it. "But Pippi is a firecracker," we explained, and then she grinned widely and accepted her new title.
Pippi, whose surname is actually Långstrump, is a peculiar rolemodel for children. F quite quickly understood that you shouldn't really jump up and down on top of tables, eat birthday cake for breakfast or jump off the edge of buildings. It's funny when Pippi does it, but not in real life. F realised this quickly because Daddy was extremely fast in giving serious explanations of gravity, nutrition and other science facts, as though Open University was using the show as a teaching example - "Let's just pause the action here and think about what Pippi is doing for a moment. If you consider the acceleration of a free-falling body in normal atmospheric conditions..."
It's a great bit of old telly, though, made in Sweden in the 70s with brilliantly duff special effects. Proper heritage stuff. The nearest equivalent I could think of was the old BBC Narnia adaptation, the one where Aslan was a motheaten sock puppet and the Beaver family was the Talking Animal equivalent of putting on Blackface.
F's favourite episode of the whole series was of course the one with the worst possible connotations in English. It's where Pippi, idly considering some of her treasures one morning, comes up with a strange new word. She decides to use this word for everything until she finds the thing it really means.
The word in question, sadly, is 'Spunk'. It's quite hard to stay deadpan when the episode is riddled with classic dialogue like 'all the best sweet shops sell spunk', 'oh, what a sweet little spunk!' (to a baby, as well) or 'Don't you know it's dangerous to drink spunk?'
But it's stay deadpan or explain to F why I'm sniggering, and that's a conversation for a later date. When she's, say, in her mid-thirties.
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