Having missed the popular sitcom thus far due to simply being elsewhere at the time, I found myself watching it as to settle in my mind, once and for all, whether it deserved its enormous hype. It was, in fact, an amusing but nonetheless standard tale of twentysomething angst, better than most but not quite hitting the dizzying heights of mirthdom occupied by Friends.
Ally is funny, alright, but it had one factor, one element that grabbed my attention in the trailers and compelled me to give this show my undivided attention. It had a weird baby in it. A weird spear-throwing baby.
Not that the rest of it wasn't quite up to scratch - on the contrary - the show was in turns funny, sad, touching and surreal. Still, one thought kept going over and over in my head:
What's with the Weird Baby?
Spooky.
Not as spooky, I was later to discover, as the American cult phenomenon that has surrounded the Weird Baby for quite some time now. I would consider myself reasonably adept on the internet. I know where to find the Slap A Spice Girl site, I've seen the Roadkill site and I'm sure that finding Bill Clinton's shenanigans reported in full wouldn't take up too much of my time. Still, I had never heard of the Weird Baby thing until I read about it in The Mail On Sunday this morning.
I'm not generally one for right-wing tabloid trash, but as it comes with a free mystery prize for every reader, plus part two of its cookery supplement, I figured it would be okay to put aside my moral indignation and send Rik down to the cornershop to get it.
Therein I saw an entire feature on the Weird Baby, or Baby Cha-Cha as it is officially known. Internet surfers refer to it as The Dancing Baby, but however you refer to it, according to this article, it's a goldmine. "2000 websites... Dancing Baby greetings cards... one, inspired by Titanic, shows 50 drowned Babies floating in the water... T-shirts, school excercise books and an 8in-tall mechanical Dancing Baby which comes packed in a cardboard computer console - nearly 250,000 have been ordered by wholesalers..."
It appears I'm a little late then. I blame it on my stubborn refusal to go to University. I'm getting old, behind the times, I - gasp - am the last to catch on in a rapidly expanding cult which has already outgrown its original market and has become - groan - a consumer commodity.
Where have I been?
I was first with The X-Files, and Radiohead, and The Verve. I was pretty damn early to catch on to Sesame Street and The Teletubbies as Student Cult Ironic Cool Playthings... Now to see my attempt at street credibility thrown out of the window by a jiving infant is, quite frankly, rather galling.
More worrying still, I'm behind even the likes of Camille Paglia, who apparently wrote in the New York Times that "for people to identify with a dancing baby indicates some deep, deep trauma. Young people want caretaking. They want someone to make the rules, to monitor their sex life; they want daddies. The Dancing Baby is a self-portrait of American Youth."
Bollocks. It's a dancing baby, not an essay by Germaine Greer, to be pondered and pretentious.
According to Michigan uni lecturer Susan Douglas, "The Dancing Baby alerts viewers to the infantilisation of a female newsmaker. We sorely needed this when reporters insisted on referring to the 24-year-old Monica Lewinsky as a "girl"." Fair enough, perhaps, but then "girl" is a marked differentiation from "crusty old man", as in Clinton's case...
Further purple prose for the trendy toddler ensues, and it all gets rather boring.
There are a number of types of people at work here:
The first create the phenomenon.
The second spot it.
The third market it.
The fourth theorise about it.
The fifth buy the merchandise, and three months later are sick of the idea.
Of course, all in all there is only one appropriate response, only one justified theory as to the popularity of the Dancing Baby:
It's a computerised baby that dances like an adult to really bad music.
Cool.