In the last year or so, the Zoo comedy trio were being hailed as the funniest thing that struck our television screens since – well – probably since the times of the jolly Charles Thake and his Canada Dry Sugar-free glamour girl ads. I am told that the Zoo shows were all sell-outs and people were doubled over with laughter whenever they took to the stage. Their television programme “Skartocc” was touted as being a satire which poked fun at the people who pass for celebrities around here – supposedly on the lines of the Italian “Striscia La Notizia”. It was pulled off air by PBS, but not before creating a furore, with Eileen Montesin claiming that the Zoo team had gone “too far” with its parody and ridicule in her regard. And then there was a lengthy discussion about what “going too far” was – rather like the kind of letters teenage girls used to send Jackie magazine about making out with their boyfriends – and then Zoo disappeared from the small screen for some time.
All along I wondered what the fuss was about. Not the Montesin matter – I had missed the sketch where she was pilloried – but the whole Zoo trip. I just didn’t get it. While the rest of Malta was apparently in fits at their antics, I would watch sketch after sketch completely poker-faced. The silly costumes, the put-on accents, the clowning about – I just found it slapstick rather than satire. Worse, I thought it was just not funny, not amusing, not witty – not anything really, just a tedious collection of boring sketches where the Zoo team run around in badly-fitting costumes with blacked-out teeth and wigs all-awry repeating jokes and plot-lines which had already done the rounds on the Internet or on foreign comedy shows.
There was one sketch where two of the people from Zoo hung around the Triton Fountain asking people to throw coins in it, telling them there was a legend which said they would return to Malta if they did so. Then they made fun of the paltry amounts thrown into the fountain and ended the sketch by fishing out the coins themselves. This particular sketch was spectacularly unfunny but there were many similar ones where the level never got beyond fart jokes, taking the mickey out of dim beauty show contestants and the kind of jokes which had you splitting your sides when you were ten. I thought it was all rather crass and would zap onto something more amusing – such as the news programmes on Net TV – but I continued to wonder whether I was the only one who thought so.
Wasn’t there anybody out there who found the Zoo shows to be a combination of clumsy sketches which were more farce and school boy humour rather than wit and satire? And didn’t anybody find some of their sketches vulgar or in bad taste?

For a long time, I thought that I was alone or part of a minority which did not appreciate Zoo’s particular brand of humour. However a letter to the press by someone who attended the latest Zoo show confirmed that I was not alone and that the team sometimes has difficulty in distinguishing between scenarios which elicit a grin and those which should make their audience cringe. The author of the letter said that part of the most recent Zoo show included a sketch were an actor pretended to rape a toy poodle saying it reminded him of how his uncle had “loved” him when he was a little boy.
The letter-writer stumbled out of the show, sickened and close to tears while the rest of the audience continued chomping on their hamburgers, guffawing and enjoying the show. Maybe they hadn’t realised that it was incest and child abuse which was being played for laughs, or maybe they did realise and still found it hilarious.
Either way, such reactions from Maltese audiences bring me to mild despair. We’re either so thick that we fail to recognise that it’s a simulation of boy-bonking that’s taking place on stage, or so insensitive that we find it funny. A couple of shows further and we’ll be billing snuff films as comic entertainment. There is a line between being funny and audacious and showing blatantly bad taste and the Zoo team have crossed it. What’s worse is that they probably think that they’re being daringly Little Britain-like. They couldn’t be more wrong.

There was an interesting exchange of views about children, school hours and parenting in the press recently. It was initiated by a working mother who proposed a longer school day so that mothers could work full-time if they so wished. She suggested that schools remain open till 5 pm every day. Lessons would still finish at 2.30 pm, but the extra time could be utilised either by students doing their homework or else by taking up other activities such as drama, art, sport and dance. Children could be supervised by teachers at hand to correct classwork or homework or to help out students who find themselves in difficulty with their homework. There is also the suggestion of shorter holiday periods. The letter-writer concludes that, “It is only by having more and longer schooldays that more women will be able to enter the workforce.”
The suggestion is not a new one. It is similar to the “wrap-around care” mooted by Tony Blair where children (toddlers to teens) were to be provided with affordable care at their schools from 8 am to 6 pm with breakfast, tea and homework help also being available.
On the face of it, wrap-around care seems to be the solution to a working couple’s biggest problem – where to leave the children when they are both out at work. For such parents, safe, affordable childcare manned by highly-trained staff which is open all day might seem like a godsend. What could be more convenient than picking up a child who has completed his homework, had his tea and run his laps and is now ready to spend “quality time” with his parents? Wouldn’t that do away with the need to cram work appointments during school hours or foregoing jobs with hours that don’t coincide with school hours? Wouldn’t it mean that parents got to enjoy only the “good bits” of being Mum and Dad and not the non-rewarding and time-consuming feeding rituals and wrestling with theorems and logarithms?
Seeing the question from this angle – that of a working mother who has to face a daily struggle dashing from work to pick up the kids, wrap-around care seems to be the ideal solution. There is another side to the argument – that concerning children’s right to spend time with their parents and enjoying the attention and affection which only they can provide. As a primary school teacher wrote in response to the letter mentioned above, “These poor children spend the majority of their day passing from one carer to the next (very often grandparents), having very little or no time at all to bond with their parents. Do we realise the craving that our children have for their parents’ genuine affection? Apparently not. We are more keen on finding new ways on how to ‘dump’ our children in a secure environment rather than providing this same environment ourselves.”
She continues, “Parents need to be made aware of how important it is that they bring up children themselves and transmit to them values which they ought to have themselves.”
Her conclusion is that, “The problem is not where to ‘keep children while parents work, but ‘how’ we should transmit the love for our children.” With these words the Maltese teacher is echoing the objections forwarded to Blair’s wrap-around care suggestion, which were viewed by many as an invitation to divest the parenting role onto professionals while women went out to work.
I am reproducing a letter which a member of the lobby group for British full-time mothers had published. She wrote, “We have turned into a ‘Baby-lite’ society. All the various political parties will be congratulating themselves on their planned future provision of childcare for under-fives and maternity benefits. But yet again their visions do not provide real choice for parents. The policies only assist parents in choosing to return to work; there is no support for either parent to choose to remain at home with their child. With New Labour’s recent offer of ‘Wrap-around Care’ parenting is demoted yet again. Will Tony Blair’s next policy be to instigate ‘Bed and Board’ so parents won’t even have to bother with putting the kids to bed at night after a hard day at the office?
All babies, children and adults crave parental attention, love, touch, guidance, yet are denied it at every turn in our society. We need to create an environment that not just raises but nurtures children. Society cannot lose. So, instead of everyone working and being taxed to fund programmes to fight crime, tackle childhood obesity and anti-social behaviour, we should invest in our children at source: solid investment in good parenting in the early years will reap true, long-term rewards for all - especially the respect Tony Blair seems so keen to promote.
“The perpetuated non-status of motherhood in our culture only serves to continue a vicious cycle of needy, demanding, spoilt humans who really just crave that original parental care. I wonder what the consequences will be for a future society where children are only raised in a communal setting, not on individual parenting.”
Looking at it, it seems she does have a point. Wrap-around care may well lead us to a situation where children are not to be seen, heard or parented – the ultimate baby-lite society.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt