4 Punishing Edutainment Videos from the 90s

Education is a different ballgame now. With her iPad and her bottomless well of cartoons on whatever subject crosses her hungry mind, my daughter is streets ahead of where I was. (This does mean she thinks she's American - always asking for soda and candy - but I'm sure this will pass.)

For all the scoffing I do at the absolute shite she finds, I have to admit it's more hit than miss. And it's quite remarkable that a bored teenager in The Phillipines can create more engaging, educational videos than BBC Schools could manage with teams and a budget. For every Art Attack or How-To, there was stuff like this:

1) CAROL VOREDEMAN'S POP MUSIC TIMES TABLES

I don't know if others are the same, but put any words to any music and I will remember them forever. It's amazing. I remember entire songs which were lost to time before I started school. Others are still around, proof that I'm not just crazy. Like this crime against kids, which certainly did its best:

Yes, it's the times table set to the gayest parts of 90s pop culture! With that smart lady your dad fancies! There's MC Hammer, Madonna and (I think) Ace of Base. So much of my summer was spent trying to impart to my mum just how gay this was. I knew the smacked arse was coming, but it was the principle of the thing. I would then be pointed at the telly, start writhing like a pig glued to an armchair huffing and groaning in desperate protest, and be in tears by song three.

Cruel irony is, it didn't even work. My magic memory doesn't work for numbers. I'm forced to relive this trauma word-for-word as my failing brain sees fit, but the bulk of it is just, "uh times uh is uh". I've retained all of the nonsense and none of the education.

2) ENGLISH EXPRESS

To my mum's credit, she did see how crap this was. We sat through it once and she gave it back to her friend. Months later I got food poisoning and had fever dreams about this specific scene - which now looks better suited to Soviet propaganda than a linguistics class. I'm pretty sure I saw Toy Story that same year - was this really the best we could do...?

Forget the production - look at that shit, lazy dancing! They couldn't even imagine people who might be interested in this. There's a bit where I think they'd forgotten to draw one of the girls, and just pop her in mid-scene. It's signed off with "yabba-dabba-doo" in case you weren't bewildered enough.

The kicker is, there's nothing useful here at all. Once again I'm left with maddening crap in my head to zero purpose. All it tells me is what words are. I know what words are. The exam will assume this, because it will be written in words. Alan Partridge did a much better yet equally pointless ditty on this subject, in the excellent Oasthouse podcast.

3) THROUGH THE DRAGON'S EYE

Now this one I did like. I think we all did. It was part of BBC's Look and Read - a series of dramas connected by the rarely-challenged premise that fantastical creatures need help from primary school children to save them from phonetics-based peril.

I must have been about six when they hit me with the above. It came off the back of the first clifhanger I ever remember. A video call with Doris, struck dumb with terror at something off-screen. My young mind was racing all week. Was this the villain Charn we'd heard so much about? Yes it was. And to a brain stupid enough to accept the felt dragon costume as convincing, he was just as scary as advertised.

With the head of one of those old-timey plague masks except with horns and gnarled tree roots, a hint of rotting flesh underneath and a thin, avian ribcage, he pointed sharp, bony fingers and talked with a menacing hiss. If this were a Halloween costume it would be considered a bit much even today. I wouldn't be this frightened again until the beginning of Ghostbusters.

4) MAGIC GRANDAD

What's more interesting to a six-year-old than listening to their grandad talk about the past? Set this to music and you're on to a winner:

Except, no. Even first-hand stories about the war were boring, which when I think about it now is weird. Stories about how your grandma did the housework before washing machines? Captain Planet with a kazoo couldn't hold my attention there.

This episode does have the sense to at least tease some action. Back in time, Magic Grandad shows the kids the belt and tells them Daddy is king because he brings in the money, so they'd better scuttle away to a corner and shut up. "That's not fair", they rightly say. Dad enters like a Victorian Jack Dempsey, arms crossed and annoyed, and the children give him some lip. But the thrashing doesn't happen and they just go home. Booooo!

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

My mum would have me play this track on repeat, which I actually liked. Once again though, it taught me nothing. It doesn't even try until the 55-second mark.

This song they played for weeks in French is one of the only ones that worked. Moi, je vends des glaces! Lovely stuff.

There was another video about road safety, starring a grandad who kept telling us how much he loves vegetable samosas. I need to find this!