Baby Einstein - Baby Van Gogh

Are you concerned that your 8 month year baby can't conduct a character analysis of Hamlet or provide a convincing reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers with finger paint?

WELL FEAR NO MORE!

The good people at Baby Einstein have provided all you parents of criminally dense (what do you mean they can't improvise a sonnet in classical French?) children with a delightful range of products.

As this is the only possible place for me to rabbit on about such tripe, in the following review I will look at-

Baby Van Gogh Video & Art and Baby Shakespeare Video .

The premise behind both marvellous products is that by plonking your child in front of a video screen which shows great art accompanied by great classical music (why not Metallica is my unanswerable question) or recites poetry over a Beethoven score they will grow up to be a genius.

I am particularly curious why Van Gogh was chosen for this noble social experiment . Are parents hoping to raise a new species of Van Goghs? Because that's just what we need. More simpering arty twits who sell a single painting in their lifetime, go batty because they get rejected by a waitress, then chop off their ear before drinking themselves to a premature death in an Arles slum. BRILLIANT! Why can't our infants be exposed to Salvador Dali- The Great Masturbator perhaps- or anything by Georgia O'Keeffe, Brancusi or even Michaelangelo (oh wait- there are RUDEY NUDEY bits in the big M, and then he was also gay, and we can't have that in our infants).

More interesting, to someone with my background at least, are the musical selections.

Gymnopedie by Satie. A Gymnopedie, for the record, is an Ancient Greek dance performed in threes. The first by boys, the second by adolscents and the third by men. All in the buff and all charged with homoeroticism. Though, to give the Baby Einstein people a chance, they now believe that maybe those Spartans were just unarmed. But still. Not to mention Satie was, to put it gently, so damn high he was over the moon.

Carmen Overture by Bizet. Oh perfect. A loose moralled hussy taunts various glum army officers in and around Seville, drops her garters at the merest whim, dabbles in black magic and then eventually get stabbed outside a bullfight. Just the thing for a small child!

William Tell Overture by Rossini. Yay! Oppression of a people! Father shooting arrows at beloved son!

Pictures at an Exhibition- Promenade, Blue Danube Waltz by Muggorsky and Strauss respectively. No complaints there.

Bolera [sic]- Ravel. Wow, the Baby Einstein company, entrusted with educating your child, has spelt Bolero wrongly. It's only possibly the most popular piece of classical music. Anyone could make the mistake. Also, this is perhaps the most overtly sexual music of any classical work- just the thing to get your child interested in a lifetime of S&M and Bondage (that bloody drum just does not stop).

Gait [sic again] Parisienne - Offenbach. Firstly, the good people at Baby Einstein have mucked up again. It's Gaite with a little acute accent on the e. As opposed to Gait, which is a kind of limp. And those glorified hookers, aka the Can Can girls in this piece, could not do the splits, let alone take off their knickers in a high kick, if they had a gait. Introduces bubba to a life time of absinthe (see SATIE, above), hedonism and Les Can-Can Girls.

Lullaby - Brahms. No complaints apart from the fact it's pretty boring.

More Muggorsky with the Great Gate of Kiev . It's alright. But let's not forget that the following 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky celebrates Russia suitably crushing it's enemies in a bloodbath.

The Baby Shakespeare feature poetry by Tennessee Williams (the perfect role model), Robert Frost, Yeats and the namesake of the video. And you thought Dr Seuss was acceptable for your infant. Are you deliberating sentencing your child to a life time of Fast Food employment, or are you just bad parent? . It is also accompanied by a Beethoven score, including the inescapable Fur Elise .

Where to start with Beethoven, possibly the angstiest composer of all time? Never mind he was a chronic womaniser, an alcoholic, is suspected of abusing his nephew (who later attempted suicide- firing two shots into his head- but somehow surviving), a meglomaniac... and then there is his artistic championship of writing and conducting the 9th Symphony (also on this video) whilst completely deaf.

One of the few positives for this product, is it's not made by the dreadful Infantelligence company (which now seems to be bust)- maker of the infamous Birds of Prey Flash Cards, and the Great Art Flashcards which featured Picasso's Guernica (need I really comment on that one?). Because it is crucial that Baby can differentiate between a Bald Headed Eagle and a Spotted Beak Owl at ten paces and can trace the development of Futurism in Art of the 1930s.

The whole concept of Baby Einstein is too tacky for words. The implication is by buying a Baby Einstein product (preferably in gift sets labelled "For Complete Development") you're securing a bright future for your child, filled with Pulitzer Prizes, Nobel Prizes and Harvard Chairs. Get real. Einstein himself famously failed most of his schooling, and Shakespeare, Van Gogh and Beethoven didn't have gullible parents waving flash cards in their face screaming "It's only the Venus de Milo! Why won't you remember this one!" before bursting into sobs thinking Junior will never get into Yale at age 10 now. They were too busy being real babies, getting into trouble, pooping, crying and keeping people awake. Parents of a small baby have enough on their plate without being bullied into thinking that without regular exposure to Mahler their child will be a dunce.

Children will grow up much happier on a strict diet of Seuss, sleep and Sesame Street- not Sartre, sashimi and Stravinsky. But what would I know?

I'm all for exposing children to the great artistic triumphs- but for heaven's sake not at nine months. Soon we'll be piping The Ring Cycle into the Womb and having compulsory showings of Fritz Lang's Metropolis at Kindergarten.