Today I got into an online debate about ‘In the Night Garden’ with a mum who’s a massive fan of it. (She’d seen an earlier post when I’d suggested that Iggle Piggle and Upsy-Daisy were nazis and ‘Jen’ wasnt at all happy).
At one point she argued that “The Night Garden is sweet, is about fun and friendship and at the end of the day wouldn’t the Night Garden be just a lovely place to live?”.
To which I replied: “Really? OK, ..but in whose house?”
And it’s an important point.. If you had to live in the Night Garden whose house would you live in? Because they’re all well crap.
The Tombliboo house looks nice from the outside but the interior looks like its been built out of twiglets and varnished dog shit.
Makka Pakka’s cave is basically a f*cking tomb. And its also built in a dry river-bed on a flood plain.. which means if there’s a flash flood he’s f*cked it. (And in a flood the first thing that goes is the sewage drains, so any prolonged rainfall and he’s going to be either dead or knee-deep in Ha Hoo shit).
On the face of it The Pontipines have the best house but you’ve got to bear in mind that it’s a semi-detached and the Wottingers next door have got 8 bloody kids.
Obviously, The Wottingers have exactly the same problem.. living next door to the Pontipines and their 8 kids. But for them its even worse because they’ve got to live next door to Mr Pontipine… who I’ve always thought was a bit of a smug prick.. with his dopey moustache.. that he obviously thinks makes him look like Magnum but actually just looks like a hippy’s bush has been stuck to his stupid ball-shaped face.
Upsy Daisy and Iggle Piggle dont even have a house. Upsy daisy’s got a bed on wheels that she drags around like some lost mental patient after a f*cking apocalypse.. and Iggle is apparently homeless. He’s just got an old crusty blanket. I don’t even know where he sleeps, but if the Night Garden has a branch of Greggs he’s probably curled up in the doorway every night freezing his bollocks off and drinking lighter fluid.
So like I said to Jennifer, The Night Garden would not be a lovely place to live at all.. “and you saying it is is just papering over the cracks of the fact that it’s in the grip of a severe housing crisis”.
…..
Jennifer: “Matt, you have got waaaay too much time on your hands”.
Yeah, that’s a fair point.
Man vs Baby’s Matt Coyne is from Sheffield, South Yorkshire. In September 2015, Matt’s life was turned upside down by the arrival of his son Charlie. After three months of parenthood, he logged on to social media and wrote a viral post about his experience of having to live with ‘a furious, sleep-murdering, unstable and incontinent, breasts-obsessed midget lodger’.
Following this, Matt created Man vs Baby, which now has over 360,000 followers. And has written two Sunday Times bestselling books based on his parental triumphs and disasters, the first entitled: ‘Dummy’ and the second ‘Man vs Toddler’.
He has also written for The Guardian, The Telegraph and GQ Magazine.
Matt lives in Sheffield with his son Charlie, his partner Lyndsay and a Jack Russell terrier with ‘issues’ called Eddie.
