10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows

On the face of it simply another animated show about anthropomorphic animals, there’s a lot more going on in the BBC’s Bing than initially meets the eye.

Bing is a toddler bunny, looked after by his live-in carer Flop (soothingly voiced by award-winning Serious Actor Mark Rylance). His friends Pando and Sula (a panda bear and an elephant, respectively) have their own carers, Padget and Amma, as do his cousins Coco and Charlie. They all live in an upscale suburban town - Flop doesn’t seem to have a job, but Padget runs the local shop and Amma, the park’s café and crèche.

But where are the parents? The kids’ carers aren’t anthropomorphic animals like them: they look like nothing so much as knitted soft toys, approximations of animals, and they’re the only grown-ups that seem to exist in this charming, slightly Stepford community.

The town itself has clearly been designed for use by adults. Everything is slightly too big for the children to use successfully, as you’d expect in real life: cupboards are too high, chairs and toilets need to be climbed and scrambled onto. But the carers are even smaller than the children, so clearly they’re not the ones the town planners et al had in mind.

In fact, the only things that the carers seem to fit perfectly are their odd little cars, bulbous eggs on wheels that look like nothing so much as an alien’s version of a family automobile.

In Ted Dewan’s original Bing Bunny books, Flop seemed more like Bing’s imaginary friend, the Hobbes to his Calvin. That’s changed for the TV show, in which the children's’ carers seems like nothing so much as benevolent extraterrestrial childminders.

Far from the peaceful suburban childhood that the show seems to represent, Bing is clearly a science experiment: a Truman Show/Dark City style simulation of a real town, where mutant animal children are raised in a deliberately sanitised, pastoral environment, where their every action and interaction can be monitored and recorded.