I never watched Button Moon as a child, but I have watched it as an adult. And, quite frankly, it is a tool of gender role enforcement and brainwashing so shocking that it is a wonder the children of the 80’s are not as repressed and psychologically damaged as the ‘Feminine Mystique‘ families of the 50’s. Wiki describes it as:
“Button Moon was a popular children’s television programme broadcast in the United Kingdom in the 1980s on the ITV Network. Thames Television produced each episode which lasted ten minutes and featured the adventures of Mr. Spoon who, in each episode, would travel to Button Moon in his homemade rocket-ship. All of the characters within the show were based on kitchen utensils, as well as many of the props.”
Each episode begins with a delightful scene of Mr Spoon, his wife Mrs Spoon (who of course takes her husband’s name, thereby reliquinshing her identity, property rights and individuality) and his daughter ‘Tiny Tea Spoon’ (thus named she is belittled, the very act of naming her after the frankly inferior-to-your-average-spoon teaspoon enforcing her subordinate place in the family as a daughter, setting her up for an inferior place in society as a woman.) We usually see Mrs Spoon involved in some charming aspect of childrearing such as teaching her daughter to read, reinforcing the caring, nurturing mother role that women are supposedly better at despite any genetic or biological evidence to corroborate this. Mr Spoon surveys his family with a warm sense of patriarchal pride as he walks out to his spaceship to explore the skies. He then proceeds to leave his family behind (the skies are not for women to explore after all) and, once safely ensconced in his phallic spaceship, he shoots into space, each ejaculation into the skies (which incidentally have clouds, gravity, rain and giant taps that talk – thereby proving that Button Moon is a ridiculous metanarrative of male dominance with no empirical basis behind it, just like patriarchy) a success, driving him into the black skies of exploration and adventure like all the much-lauded male heroes created by patriarchy in fiction as part of the female=passive, male=active paradigm.
Once he is in space Mr Spoon explores Button Moon and uses his telescope (another phallic shaped instrument) to survey more and more of the universe. Meanwhile Mrs Spoon and her daughter sit at home, awaiting father’s return where he will no doubt regale them with tales of his adventures in his phallic spaceship of male privilege.
Thank goodness such rife sexism and gender role enforcement is no longer on our screens.
