The BBC has defended a decision to change the ending of nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. A version used on the CBeebies channel was altered so rather than “couldn’t put Humpty together again” all the King’s horses “made Humpty happy again”. The broadcaster said the change was made purely for creative reasons rather than trying to give a soft version of the rhyme for children.
A spokeswoman said: “We play nursery rhymes with their original lyrics all the time and the small change to Humpty Dumpty was done for no other reason than being creative and entertaining.”
Labour MP Tom Harris told the Independent on Sunday: “For goodness sake. Obviously children will find it far too violent, distressing and horrific that Humpty should not be put back together again. This is what happens when adults try to make these kinds of judgments.”
He told the newspaper that he had also seen Little Miss Muffet changed on the channel, so that she made friends with the spider instead of running away.
and a CCTV to verify that bad stories are not told to young`unz
Oh and mom and dad can not talk about the economy or race issues or flu jabs or job loss or a trip to the pub or bathroom issues within ear shot of a child
I’d recommend changing “Little Miss Muffet” because it’s too close to saying muff.
Eeewwww
Idiots. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales are supposed to be “the world is a dangerous place 101”
Wow, this is cool….
Kids can grow up happy without the chance of failure, be fed and entertained without the inconvenience of work, be told what to think without the consequences of asking questions and have all of their problems solved by someone else.
What are we complaining about??
/sarc
#3 Exactly.
Many nursery rhymes and fairy tales were designed to help children deal with tragedy, as there was a lot of it at the time they were written. That’s why so many of them were violent.
Skanky banker turned out to be a rat
Leapt off a building & made a great splat
I guess that affects versions my friend used to tell: Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider who sat down beside her, and she smashed it with her spoon. The others were less printable…
I think we shouldn’t talk to kids at all. Too risky.
What is next? Mandatory sleeping helmets in case the tot falls out of bed? Jeez.
the end isn’t near, the end is here…..
The world isn’t all safe and cozy and kids need to learn that early. Nursery rhymes were to inform kids, and give them some sense of danger. There are spiders that children should run away from, there are wolves who do eat children, and not everything broken can be fixed.
“You know”–all this adult “childhood means xyz” is just more crap. Kids are individuals too. I don’t remember being scared by clowns. Hanzel and Greta meant don’t go off in the woods by yourself. Humpty Dumpty was an EGG–if you break it, you can’t put it back together again===be careful around eggs, and so forth.
More parental projection. Love your kiddies, answer their questions, try to let them grow up to be the people they want to be.
My first reaction to this was “if you got this from the Daily Mail, I will bitchslap you”.
It turns out that you managed to do even worse. You got it from the Daily Express! Heck, at least the Daily Mail occasionally prints news. The Daily Express is barely a paper. We are talking about a tabloid that had the same picture of Madeleine McCann on their front cover for a whole year!
Don’t these idiots realize children made up these damn things in the first place? No to mention the nursery rhyme is oral history, dealing with King Richard III, the hunchbacked monarch’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field. He fell from his steed, named “Wall” (as famously quoted in Shakespeare’s “Richard III”). Next thing they’ll try to stop kids from saying “ashes, ashes, they all fall down” in “Ring around the Rosie”.