Children's entertainers, and the 2nd most embarrassing experience of my childhood

I like camomile tea.  I understand that Pilates is probably a good thing.  I’ve even been known to have Enya on in the background.  But I will not, ever, under any circumstances, not even at Nazi gunpoint, embrace my ‘inner child’.  Yes, I realise it’s something to do with letting go your responsibilities and being carefree for a while, which all sounds very nice, but I have the nagging suspicion my inner child is just a version of the real child I used to be.  For 25 years I’ve tried to forget the awkwardness and embarrassment of being a strange child, the kind of boy who had a tendency to say things that made rooms go quiet, with much eye-rolling and eyebrow-raising.  My own particular favourite was the time I asked my dad what the studded slogan on the back of the biker’s jacket in Victoria Coach Station meant.  It read, “Blowjobbers Ain’t Suckers”, and boy did I ask loudly.  This is not a child I want to embrace, it is the child I want to hold underwater until the bubbles stop.

The thing is, I thought for years that I was an unusual child.  Surely no other kids went through a year-long Agatha Christie-inspired paranoid phase convinced that their own family was trying to bump them off?  I reckoned I was Pugsley Addams and everyone else was John-Boy Walton.  One hour of children’s theatre this past weekend has fixed all that though.  I now know that all children, no matter how sweet and innocent they may seem, have an inbuilt drive for mischief and evil.  To be specific, children want adults to make fools of themselves.  They want us to fall over, run into trees, bang our shins, and basically appear like idiots.  Give them a nice song with some clever wordplay and an amusing little dance, and they’ll smile politely; give them comedy violence which involves the villain losing his trousers and they’ll howl their little guts up with laughter.  Little bastards.  Kids love clowns, and that should’ve been the clue.  No, they’re determined to strip the last vestiges of dignity away from us, and the saddest thing is that we go along with it.  I took my brood to see Disney On Ice a few months ago, and witnessed a grown man who should’ve known better dressing up as Tigger, presumably at the insistence of his spawn.

I think what I’m taking from this experience is that we should cherish children’s entertainers in the same way we revere our grandmothers or look up to Gandhi.  This weekend we get to witness the great in-house mutual-masturbationary back-slapping-contest that is the Oscars, when a bunch of massively rich egos gather in a theatre to tell each other how great and necessary they are.  What is it that Dora Finsecker says in Fame?  “I HATE Ralph Garci!  I must remember this feeling and use it in my acting!”  Well, if actors draw on past experience to create their performances, then children’s entertainers are the greatest creative actors in the history of the world, because no one has ever ever been as jolly as they have to be on a daily basis.  They grin, bounce, sing the most inane ditties and generally act the maggot, just to amuse the most critical audience known to man.  Bow before them, because Fassbender and McConaughey have nothing on Mr Tumble.