aslan product placement

We watched a trail for Narnia at school, on the interactive whiteboard.

What?

Every classroom in Mol and Zig’s school now has an interactive whiteboard: a superdooper connect t’internet and … interact … whiteboard.

And they both - that’s the Year 2 and Year 5 classes at least - watched a trail for the Narnia film.

This unsettles me hugely. They attend a Church Of England school because it is the nearest, it is a good school, and it’s important to Geroff and me for the kids to go to school with the neighbourhood kids. Not because it is CofE. Because it is CofE I can – sort of - understand the pimping of Christian allegory through the medium of interactive whiteboard, but shit and fucking hell, it’s advertising. Pure and simple.

How long and how, if not already, will the names creep in? Will McD’s ‘incentivise’ schools to display a small golden arsecheese at the top of the screen, which begins to blink at 11:45? Will Run Spot, run in Nike?

There is an interactive whiteboard pipeline direct to my kids in a place they trust. It won’t take long, the brands can smell it. If they haven’t already devised and funded it.

I don’t like this one little bit.

Wasn’t too keen on the film, either. Which, by the power of interactive whiteboard or otherwise, was the becoming traditional family cinema twixt Christmas and New Year visit choice for 2005. No adaptation betters my head Lion, Witch or Wardrobe, imprinted by reading the damn book. Simple.

The wardrobe is even at the wrong angle. I know. The kids, however, loved it.