...asked my husband. He'd gotten the DVD of the classic Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry BBC show out of the library. The question was, could we watch it with our eight-year-old daughter in the room.
I looked it over. "I don't see why not," I said. Comedy of manners and all that. "If anything, she'd get bored." Which didn't seem like that big a deal, since she was involved in her own activities anyhow and not completely paying attention to the TV.
So in it went.
After about five minutes, she said, flatly, "I don't like it."
Ten: "I don't like it."
Fifteen: "Mommy, I don't like it."
Twenty: "Daddy, I don't like it."
I could tell by her voice that she wasn't just bored by it--something about it *was* bothering her. I could not for the life of me imagine what.
She did think Stephen Fry looked "evil" as Jeeves, picking up, as kids will do, all the undertones. Fry's Jeeves does indeed have something subversive and unresolved about him, and of course there was the strangeness of the very formal master/servant relationship between him and Laurie's Bertie Wooster. She had never seen anything like that before. So I could see, or thought I could see, why she was a little weirded out.
But the story itself seemed perfectly harmless--Bertie Wooster gets stuck with looking after a hapless geek by said geek's comically overbearing mother during a trip to America--so I didn't think it was bad enough to turn it off. I deployed the venerable "Go play in your room if you don't like it!" instead.
At bedtime (it's always at bedtime) I got the full story.
"Mommy? That mother...why didn't she let her son do things? Why didn't she let him out?"
Aaaaah.
The overbearing mother. This woman sashayed around with her grown son pathetically in tow, cowering and gnawing on his walking stick and generally displaying total helplessness in the face of her brusque dominance.
To a grownup, that's funny. To a kid, it's dead serious.
I mean, my god. What if your actual parents did that to you? The thought of your protector turning on you and making you a prisoner would have to be horrifying.
What's appropriate for kids is sometimes more subtle than just the obvious "Don't let them watch 'Law and Order.'" Things which are perfectly innocuous can still bother them because they see it differently than we do. The psychologically imprisoning mother. The helper with mysterious eyes.
And yet "Blackadder" didn't bother her at all :)
(...We obviously weren't watching *all* of the Blackadders...)
