Music is extremely important in our lives. I was brought up on music, those seventies classics which form a soundtrack to memories of holidays in Wales, some eighties classics at weird french discos where they still danced to ELO (and quite frankly, who can blame them?), as well as the point in the nineties I started working in it. It’s everywhere; music is something that’s always been with me, which I’m almost always enthusiastic about, and never seem to get tired of.

This obviously means H will be brought up in a musical household. We’ve broken her in gently, Cbeebies making the bulk of it, and nursery rhymes the rest – but for the last year or so we’ve been branching out – not so she’d really notice, nor us really. When we realised The Wiggles were on Nick Jr on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon last year, we also stumbled across the weird world of Yo Gabba Gabba. I’d seen a few US-based articles about it, and knew they had cool bands stumbling over themselves to appear on there (The Decemberists, Band of Horses, Camera Obscura, Of Montreal), and based on that fact alone it’s a winner with me (and Shaun – who was particularly amused at Anthony Bourdain appearing as a Doctor and Angela Kinsey from The US Office as a teacher).

Then they removed it. This wasn’t the end of the world, it was dubbed. Awfully dubbed. Where the kids might have american accents from various places, they ended up being from Yorkshire or Birmingham, but dubbed badly. Vicky in San Francisco sent us DVDs with the proper accents, and we all fell in love again.

Then a friend told us the badly dubbed ones are being shown again on Nick Jr at around 4am in the morning. Obviously we wont be awake then, though as luck would have it our V+ box will be, so we’ve been recording it for the last few weeks.

You know what? I can live with the badly dubbed version. It’s not as good as it should be, but it’s there and we can see it again. It’s a crazy technicolour world of music and random things, songs performed by some of my favourite bands (Flaming Lips, Super Furry Animals, Apples in Stereo, Ladytron, even Mouse on Mars for crying out loud!) and all age-appropriate with a clear message in there. Think graphics somewhere like ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ by Dee-Lite’s video crossed with vintage video games, and you’re not far off. Oh, and Biz Markie does ‘Biz’s Beat Of The Day’ in there too. It’s truly glorious television, oh it is.

What’s better is it’s something H loves, and dances to and embraces, and it’s got MY music in there. Who’d have thought that brainwashing your kids into the ways of good music could be this easy?