THE SINGING RINGING TREE (1957)

      BBC1 (DEFA)

      The garish Euro-fable that haunted a generation.

      CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT CARRIES TWO schools of thought. The first, which dominates thinking in Britain and the United States, exalts the carefree state of childhood above all else. Fun, jokes, songs and slapstick are the order of the day – kids will have enough time to learn the dry reality of life when they grow up. Let’s name this school after one of its early popular manifestations, a manically droll panto caper initiated by the BBC in 1955: the School of Crackerjack. Its opposite number takes the view that life can be harsh, and children need to be prepared for that. Fantasy is good, but always tinged with a melancholy, even morbid, edge. This school was represented in Britain by Oliver Postgate’s thoughtful stop motion tales, but was mainly prevalent in Europe, especially the part near the Iron Curtain: the Singing Ringing Tree Movement.

      Das Singende Klingende Bäumchen was a film made by DEFA, the state film studio of the German Democratic Republic in Potsdam, a loose adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Singing Springing Lark, packed with spoilt princesses, dashing princes, evil dwarves and supernatural inter-species transformations. Appropriately enough, it looked like nothing on Earth. Magical forests were rendered in those am-dram materials, papier mâché and plywood. Rustic architecture bulged, twisted and kinked as if grown from seed, and floral forms rippled with a coating of fresh porridge. Lawns had the feel of a grocer’s window display, flames were unapologetically papery and those distant hills it took the prince three days on horseback to reach were nevertheless eclipsed by his shadow – or rather one of his four shadows. Then there was the musical score, which began in syrupy orchestral mode but soon veered off into grating organ leitmotifs that would have had members of Throbbing Gristle asking for the night light to be left on.

      Even if they couldn’t put it into words, kids could sense the wrongness of this world. For many, it added to the appeal, the laissez-faire approach to storytelling mimicking their own, ever-changing, playground adventures. For others, the claustrophobic kingdom, rendered in a queasy palate of jade greens, sunburst yellows and atomic puce gave the nightmare fable a feverish sheen as enervating as it was compelling. But whether you willingly dived into this bumper colouring book, or warily regarded it through a glass of Lucozade darkly, you were, in the old-fashioned, malevolent sense of the word, enchanted.

      Despite jeers from the state’s Marxist-Leninist film critics, who deplored its ‘positive depiction of a reactionary society’, it became one of DEFA’s biggest successes in its native country. It would have stayed there if it hadn’t been for the BBC’s progressive yet cash-strapped children’s department, recently rechristened ‘family programming’ and which by 1964 was scouring the continent for schedule fillers more affordable than the USA’s premium product. Heavily subsidised and going for a song, The Singing Ringing Tree fitted the bill perfectly. Peggy Miller sliced it into three twenty-minute segments with an overdubbed storybook narration read by Late Night Line-Up presenter Tony Bilbow, whose measured tones faded in and out over the forthright declamation of the German actors, a reassuring presence in a world of antlered horses and giant ice-bound goldfish.

      While other imports had their fans, like the cheery Heidi and wistful The Boy Who Loved Horses, nothing came close to The Singing Ringing Tree’s high contrast discomfiture. It returned to the BBC every couple of years under the tenure of children’s department head Monica Sims, who consulted child psychologists to help determine the limits of child-frightening television. She concluded that ‘sometimes quite frightening experiences in fantasy programmes are far enough divorced from their own surroundings not to frighten them too badly … they get a frisson from it, but they know it isn’t actually happening here.’58 The Ruritanian cake-in-the-rain trappings of The Singing Ringing Tree certainly passed the anti-realism test, and the three-part wonder remained a fixture until 1980.

      Along the way, it picked up many companions. From Yugoslavia came equine romance White Horses, with a Jackie Lee theme song that made the top ten. France provided the more boyish contingent with overcast swashbuckler The Flashing Blade. Some series played up to national stereotype: West Germany’s The Legends of Tim Tyler was a mordant modern fable about a boy who traded his laugh with a sinister millionaire, while the Dutch Children of Totem Town concerned an experimental hippie commune for kids. Towards the end, they were just insane, like Spain’s Oscar, Kina and the Laser, in which a boy genius invents a talking laser, then flees with it and his pet goose in tow. But perhaps the most potent was Czechoslovakian parable The Secret of Steel City, a tale of two rival kingdoms, one democratic and peaceful, the other totalitarian, heavily industrialised in High Victorian manner, and preparing a super freeze weapon to conquer their neighbours. Even its knee-high audience could see through the feathered hats and Jules Verne steamship paraphernalia to the Cold War allegory beneath. The garnish of fantasy could let you slip subversive education to the kids, as well as scare them witless.