Rastamouse Controversy

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/feb/15/rastamouse-cbeebies

Rastamouse: righteous rodent or rank stereotype?

Commentary 

The language issue in this text is represented positively. Throughout the text, we could say the semantic field is popularity; ‘energy’ ‘hero’ ‘fans’ ‘rising’ ‘most-watched’ ‘best’ ‘problem-solving’. All these word classes have optimistic connotations in which may allow the audience to have a positive approach towards ‘Rastamouse’.

The adverb of comment, ‘pleasingly retro feel’ pre-modifies the attributive adjective ‘retro’ for emphasis in which it will allow the audience to feel pleased and satisfied about the programme. The writer has cleverly used the adjective ‘retro’. Nowadays, through the media, retro is seemed to be the growing fashion/trend. Therefore, ‘retro’ catches the audience’s attention and creates the effect of persuading the audience to think that ‘Rastamouse’ is the new, cool trend and everyone should like it as it’s the ‘fashion’.

The proper nouns, ‘Paddington Bear’, ‘Dizzee Rascal’ and ‘Tinie Tempah’ are all famous and well-known names. The writer has created the effect of slowly allowing the audience to like ‘Rastamouse’ and making them assume that this programme is liked and preferred by everyone since the proper nouns mentioned are too.

The writer starts off the text with a triad rhetorical question, ‘righteous rodent or rank stereotype’. The controversy between the evaluative adjectives of ‘righteous’ and ‘rodent or rank’ suggests that as a result of ‘Rastamouse’ having many negative viewpoints from other sources such as The Telegraph and Mirror, the writer could not simply show his opinion straight away since it would not draw the audience’s attention. However, the purpose of writing ‘righteous’ first is that it could be argued to show the writers’ viewpoint; in which ‘Rastamouse’ programme is favoured by the writer. 

Almost ¾ of the text has confident representation about ‘Rastamouse’. There is only a short section on the negatives about the show. The writer has intelligently used statistics to make the audience follow the writers’ viewpoint. The use of factual statistics used, such as complaints from ‘6 viewers’ and ‘95’ complaining about the patois spoken actually encourages the audience to not feel discouraged about the show, but allows audience to not really care about the numbers. The reason being would be that beforehand, the writer has used the large number ‘9000’ fans, creating the effect of ignoring the negative statistics since the positive statistic of ‘9000’ is much larger than ‘6’ and ‘95’.

All of this allows the audience’s response to be in agreement with what the writer is saying.