Ruff-Ruff, Tweet and Dave

Left to right: Ruff-Ruff, Tweet and Dave

My daughter's latest TV obsession is not, thankfully, Harlan Coban's The Five, but CBeebies' Ruff-Ruff, Tweet and Dave, a brightly coloured, highly repetitive observation game featuring the three title characters - a red dog, a yellow chick who claims to be capable of flight despite the absence of mature primary feathers, and a blue panda who can't teleport* - and their day care minder/imaginary friend Hatty the Hamster.

"Yes, I'm wearing a flower pot. Deal with it."

Each episode, Hatty greets the audience, then visits Ruff-Ruff, Tweet and Dave. They discuss something, then ask Hatty what today's adventure will be. He waves his top hat, which transforms into a more apposite form and pops out a card telling them that they will be going on an adventure directly related to their recent discussion.

The three then jump in their 'rolly-pods' - fancy looking go-carts - and descend from the perilous mesa where they live, followed by Hatty in his bubble copter, and all enter the Spin Again, a spinning top shaped flying machine which whisks them off to some magical land. Here they are faced with a number of problems, and this is where the meat of the show comes in.

From 'A Music-Making Adventure', of course.

At each point of decision or contention, Hatty feels a game coming on, his hat pops out a card in a flurry of gigles and bubbles, and the friends exclaim 'Game time! Game time!'** Hatty asks the question on the card and each of the three suggests an answer. Based on the preceding segment, the viewers are invited to choose which of the three answers is correct. The genius of this is of course that, while they are solving the problem, the children watching only need to pick one of the same three names each time, so there's no stumbling over phrasing or trying to correctly pronounce new words.

Arya is not perfect on this, but she is pretty good, and it does seem to be doing wonders for her observation. In addition to the regular questions, I quizzed her on what each character keeps on their bedside shelf at the end of each episode - a point that is never dwelt on or even mentioned explicitly - and she was three for three.

I'm not going to lie, my point of saturation with Ruff-Ruff, Tweet and Dave is much lower than for, say, Sarah & Duck, but I can dig it, and by pausing the playback I can make sure that she's doing the interaction thing, as well as talking to her about the show, which I try to do anyway.

* I'm colour blind, okay; he looks purple to me. Not that anyone gets me on this one.
** Except the one time that the episode was apparently running long and they didn't, and don't think Arya wasn't all over that little time-saving exercise.