Sunday mornings are a dry time for me televisually. The behemoth that is Hollyoaks has never suckered me in, and the other channels diet of Christian God bothering and non-specific deity bothering bothers me not. And running and hiding from Sunday Homes & Gardens (a Lawrence Lllewelyn-Bowen front clip shop of Changing Rooms with Carol Smilie exorcised out) I ended up on the liferaft that was Channel Five. And a pair of youngsters running away from and adult and being very sulky.
Hold up I thought. What’s this. I recognise this style. Indeed I did: over the next half an hour I was confronted with a non-stop adventure about some form of child time traveling robot, his mistress, some sulky boy from the 20th Century and some gubbins about Dick Turpin actually being a fourteen year old girl. According to this show, much of the eighteenth century was entirely run by fourteen year old stage school kids. And the moral, time-traveling without due care or attention is really rather dangerous. The program was Morris 2274 , and the style was Daniel Peacock’s.
Peacock is the member of the Comic Strip that people remember even less than sulky Peter Richardson. Recently he has concentrated his output on writing and producing kids shows. These include Harry And Cosh, Channel Five’s cross between Ally McBeal and Grange Hill, and Cavegirl – a feminist, stage school version of 10 Million Years BC. All are characterised by devilishly fast non-sequitur editing, heavy on the sight gags and a fifteen year old cast who it is assumed are able to take on almost any role. Many a Saturday afternoon has been spent trying to work out what the hell was going on in Harry And Cosh. Morris 2274, on the one viewing yesterday, should be even more confusing.
(The actual plot, according to the intro is as follows. It is the year 2274. All children have a Morris, a robot tutor cum protector cum policeman. Except Billie’s Morris has gone wrong and allows her to anarchically run around in time for no reason other than dressing up purposes. It is surprising funny.)