Three sweet children, a bowlful of treats . . . what could go wrong?
APPLIANCE OF THE NIGHT: There was much to puzzle the Ellis youngsters, time-travelling on Back In Time For Tea (BBC2). ‘What’s tripe?’ they asked. ‘What’s dripping? And polony?’ But they knew what a mangle was — ‘Look, it’s a pasta maker!’
Take one five-yearold girl and leave her alone with three covered pots of cake decorations — and strict instructions not to look inside. Then retreat, and observe via hidden cameras.
everyone knows what’s going to happen next . . . everyone, that is, except the little girl’s parents. They’re desperately kidding themselves that their perfect poppet is too well-brought-up, too mature, too darn trustworthy to dip in.
That’s the premise of What Would Your Kid Do? (ITV), a gameshow that celebrates childhood mischief as it laughs at deluded mums and dads. This is a combination of The Secret Life Of Five-Year-Olds, which sets psychologists to spy on extroverted nursery children, and Mr & Mrs — the veteran quiz format that challenges couples on how well they really know each other.
all three contestants did inspect the contents of the cake pots — even amelia, whose parents were certain she’d be too well-behaved to peek. One boy with the marvellous Greek name of Genethlios went further still, and attempted to cram an entire tub of marshmallows into his face while the teacher’s back was turned.
Hard to say which was funnier . . .the mortified mum and dad or the small boy’s face as he attempted to swallow his own weight in confectionery.
One of the charms of this show is that five-year-olds, while irrepressibly naughty, are atrocious at lying. When a small boy announces earnestly that he didn’t eat any chocolate, while smeared from chin to eyebrows in Cadbury’s, it’s as endearing as it is predictable.
equally sweet was that when the boys were left unguarded with a collection of party bags, they refused to steal goodies earmarked for their friends. Loyalty, it seems, is as instinctive as mischief.
Young amelia showed no such scruples. She’d worked out that something odd was going on, not least because a talking toy robot on the table was urging her to turn thief. Weighing up her chances of being punished, especially when she could blame the robot, she helped herself.
Her confidence and quick wit might indicate a long-term weakness of the show: it’s a game strictly for out-going, fearless children who won’t freeze in front of a studio audience. We won’t see the quiet ones, the shy thinkers who might surprise us.
The Queen, when she was a five-year-old Princess elizabeth living with her toddler sister and parents on Piccadilly at the start of the Thirties, was very much the shy thinker — not at all a child for the public eye.
But as Elizabeth: Our Queen (C5) revealed, she surprised everyone by adjusting with silent determination to her new role as the future monarch, following the abdication of her uncle, edward VIII, when she was not yet ten.
This eight-part series promises to be the ideal companion to Peter Morgan’s dramatisation of her reign, The Crown, on Netflix. That drama could do little more than hint at her early years, but here we had a whole hour of insights, including some from courtiers who had known the princesses as children.
They were a fearsomely posh lot, wrapping their tonsils round words like ‘ayrcrawft’ (aircraft) and ‘rare-liced’ (realised).
But they had some delightful details to tell: as a girl, elizabeth was a keen diver, and could pluck towels off the bottom of a swimming pool.
Her thrifty pre-war upbringing has always stayed with her — she’s apt to walk round the palace switching off lights left burning by careless footmen. Waste not, want not.