Postman Pat SDS

Channel: CBeebies

Running Time: 15 minutes

Date: 2008- present

The original Postman Pat and Jess, back in the 1980s when you were a child, and nothing bad ever happened.

 Premise: Postman Pat has somehow been promoted, which would be outrageous, but when this spin-off first aired in 2008, Barack Obama was about to become president, and there was the sense that generally people got the jobs they were qualified for. Two years later, David Cameron became Prime Minister, and Postman Pat's rapid succession perhaps serves as a foreshadowing of the horrors of promoting incompetent ham-faced charlatans beyond their ability level.

Each episode, Pat is seemingly allowed to abandon his daily rounds, and scoot off to the nearby town of Pancaster to collect a 'Special Delivery', at the beck and call of the enigmatic 'Ben', possibly named after Ben Fogle, whom he resembles. Despite strict privacy laws, Ben and Pat are apparently allowed to open, examine, and sometimes play with the items that Pat is supposed to deliver.

Ben: Keeps breaking privacy laws.

Because children are supposedly too immature to appreciate the finer points of professional, efficient postal delivery, Pat is allowed to spend an entire day delivering one item, in one of his five  vehicles: aeroplane, helicopter, motorbike/sidecar, 4x4 jeep, and his regular van. He's really taking the 'Green' out of 'Greendale'. This is why they had to hike the price of stamps a couple of years ago.

Chuck in your regular supporting cast, who are really pushing the accents past 'unlikely' to 'really quite offensively poor', and some children who speak exclusively nasally, and you have Postman Pat SDS. 

Background: You all loved Postman Pat when you were children. Some of you, such as my friend Nick, had the soundtrack on vinyl, which was then added to the collection alongside Armand Van Helden and Paul Van Dyk in the late 90s, alongside a heavy dose of millennial irony. But in the same way that Hollywood is now only sequels and superheroes, someone at the BBC decided that the old episodes weren't enough for the new generation of pre-schoolers, who famously demand more 'pizzazz' from their postal distribution-based stop-motion animation. To avoid looking out of touch in a world where most of your post comes from Amazon, packaged by zero-hours minimum wage slaves, and is delivered in the middle of the day when everyone is at work, this spin-off was commissioned.

Postman Pat updated for the 21st century: on course to be history's most appalling century.

You're all wracking your brains trying to remember the episode where Postman Pat was mistaken for a member of the Japanese organised crime group the Yakuza, aren't you? Well, in 1994 Postman Pat was given an extra finger to bring him up to 5 digits, in a bid to avoid scaring Japanese children. The members of the Yakuza apparently cut off one finger in order to show their dedication and trustworthiness, and it was genuinely believed that Japanese children would mistake Postman Pat for a gangster. Just re-read that sentence again, and let it sink in. Bob the Builder went through the same process in the year 2000. We have lived through a digital revolution in more ways than one.

Entertainment: It has an unmistakable feel of the 'focus group' about it. You can visualise some suit at the BBC, presumably the person who also ruined Thomas the Tank Engine, walking round a meeting room asking the writers to make Pat 'more relevant'. Hence the rural idyll of Greendale has to share the Pat Map with the much more cosmopolitan 'Pancaster' , where presumably the aforementioned 'Ben' has a 'luxury flat', goes to wine bars, and buys his frappucinos from Cafe Nero. The set up - Pat is supposed to deliver post, makes a bollix of it - is much the same as in the original Postman Pat episodes from the 1980s, but with a bit more of a nod towards technology. For instance, we get a Loch Ness Monster Locator, delivered to Scotland in the middle of the day, by plane, to Mrs Goggins, who clearly cannot afford the delivery costs on her salary.

Celebrity culture has also hit, with popstar 'Brad Lee' making an appearance in season three: a bad boy with all the danger of a plasticine Jonas Brother; perhaps as a nod to the success of Downton Abbey we also see a cameo from the Duchess of Pencaster. Although I haven't seen it yet, there is an episode featuring a character called 'Sean McGuiness'. I get the feeling I know where he's going to be from. It is quite easy to picture the voice cast all putting up their hands to tell teacher what accent they can do - or, by the sounds of some of them, which ones they'll have a go at.

I can't remember the children of Greendale having so much airtime in the 1980s episodes, which might be a trick of the memory, but perhaps one based in my hatred of these whinging little gits. They all speak through their nose, and they appear to have got their pathetic inability to respond to setbacks from Bing the Bunny.

No-one ever watched Postman Pat for the children. No one watched it wishing Pat had a 4x4. No one wanted to see D-grade celebrities in Greendale.

It was supposed to be all about the post.

Ratings:

Sex: Not a sniff. Despite the opportunities for a postal delivery worker to witness things he really shouldn't (see the Speed 3 episode of Father Ted), 'Confessions of a Stop-Motion Postal Operative' it ain't. This is very much safe for work. And your pre-school child. 1/10

Music: They have retained the spirit of the original theme song, with a couple of nods to the 21st century with some slightly slicker synthesisers, and a disconcerting replacement of the 'letters' from 'letters to your door' with 'parcels', which always puts me off my stride. Some stupid nonsense pop songs about inclusion and fun have replaced classic declarative statement songs like 'Jess is His Cat'. Like almost everything from your childhood, apart from Margaret Thatcher, it was better in the 1980s. 4/10

Plausibility: Depends on your outlook. If you believe that the public sector is a bloated, inefficient, uncompetitive, stagnant waste of space, then you will be gullible enough to believe that the amount of tax pounds (always sounds worse than dollars, and they're nearly worth as much now) required to keep Pat's fleet of unnecessary vehicles running is a realistic portrayal of public sector waste. You never engage with public services anyway because you are too rich to care. Your name might be Alan Duncan, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Peter Bone or Philip Davies, and you can do one.

The price of 1st class stamps increased 100% from 2006 to 2016. Guess why.

However, if you actually work in or have dealt with the public sector in any way, then you will see Pat's luxury is the product of lazy writing, and the commercial department rubbing their thighs at the chance to release some new toys. However, the increased effort to make Greendale a bit more racially diverse is welcome, and probably annoys those aforementioned Tory arses, so that rescues some marks. 5/10

Education: Not a huge amount on offer, which is annoying, given its classic status in children's TV. Even the school scenes are short on content, largely to do with the fact that everything they need for their lessons is only being delivered that day by Pat. A bit of a return to silent writing and reading would be a refreshing step in Greendale Comprehensive (though it's probably Greendale Academy: A Performing Arts College by now). Doesn't teach you much about life, or the post. 2/10

Overall: There is an episode of The Simpsons where they attempt to revive Itchy and Scratchy through focus groups and network executives, and come up with Poochie the Dog, which fails, for those exact reasons. Ivor Wood, the original creator, died in 2004, and I like to think he would have said 'bugger off' to anyone who said they could improve Pat. Either that, or he's a dead-eyed capitalist who specifically requested in his will that this particular cow be cashed, without checking the quality of the milk first. 5/10