On That Baby in the Sun...

Today is of course the 40th anniversary of the first time man ever landed on the Moon, accomplished by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the Eagle lunar module. I like the Moon, so I photographed it using a point-and-shoot digital camera I had to hand during a lunar eclipse in 2007.

Surely landing on the Moon was one of the single biggest achievements in mankind's history. In honour of this, I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking about... the Sun.

Now, the title of this post might be a little confusing. It's not to be taken literally or a start. This is probably a good thing as, should a baby ever actually end up anywhere near our nearest star, they would almost certainly perish and a new generation of health-and-safety jobsworths would immediately attempt to plan a way of printing the words "KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN" on the Sun's surface. Neither, I might add, am I talking about any baby recently featured in The Sun newspaper - apparently Britain's favourite tabloid. Those of you on the same wavelength as me will have immediately understood, from the onset, that the title is a reference to that bloody awful sun-baby amalgam from Teletubbies.

Ever since I first set eyes on this horrendous creation I have thought how vulgar it is. Fair enough, each 20-minute episode of Teletubbies is set over the course of one day, initiated by the Sun rising and closed with the Sun setting over Teletubbyland while the credits roll. But who on Earth came up with the idea of making the Sun a light-emitting baby? And why?! And how come I can't even be spared the relative sanctuary of the rest of the show without the Sun interjecting
every couple of minutes.

The only plausible reason I can think of for the presence of the baby is that humans have been shown neuroscientifically to mimic the actions of similar beings around us (including via recently discovered mirror neurones). So maybe a happy baby was a a psychological ploy to make young preschoolers mimic the smiles and also feel happy whilst watching the show. But it's not even as though the child is always happy. Sure, there's giggling and {shudder} cackling, but then sometimes she looks really stern and sometimes she just stares...

(Also she makes that horrible gurgling noise babies often make...)

It's not the baby herself who is the problem. I just find the concept immensely unsatisfactory. According to the Wikipedia article on Teletubbies, the Sun was played by 7-month-old Jessica Smith. I have nothing against Jessica Smith. Bearing in mind that the show was first broadcast in 1997 (and that the producers seem to use the same baby footage week after week) then she must be 13 by now and I hope she enjoys a long and happy life free from enduring the potential psychological trauma caused by seeing a luminescent version of her face irradiating computer-generated saccharine over the drug-induced world below.

Rant over. Producers, you have a lot of explaining to do...