Why I Love… Mr Rogers

One of my closest friends has lived her whole life in America. Once, during conversation, she made a reference to a Mr Rogers. I didn’t get it. I said I knew he was a children’s TV presenter of some kind – I’d heard him mentioned on US sitcoms – but that I wouldn’t recognise him if a saw a picture.

She was so shocked she thought I was joking. I assured her I wasn’t and that I hadn’t – as she insisted I must have – grown up watching the programme Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She was quiet for a moment, and then finally said, ‘I can’t imagine growing up without Mr Rogers.’ She said it with exactly the same sense of sympathy and incomprehension that I once said, ‘I can’t imagine growing up without being about to read whatever books I wanted’ to a friend who spent her childhood in Communist Czechoslovakia.

I was immediately shown an episode. It began with a man, middle-aged and apparently unremarkable, walking into his house and singing a simple song about it being a beautiful day. As he did, he changed his suit jacket for a half-closed cardigan and his work shoes for blue trainers.

I was not immediately overwhelmed; I made some silly remark about how the man wasn’t exactly an opera singer. My friend was hurt – not in the way we are when someone is unimpressed by something we adore, but in the way we are when someone we like says something that should be beneath him. I sensed that, for my friend, this wasn’t just a fondly remembered TV show, but something semi-sacred.

It took only minutes to realise why. At first, the presenter, the slow-talking, unthreatening Mr Rogers, sat on the carpet and built a garage with some wooden blocks. He spoke of a time when he had driven an electric car, and we cut to a segment about it. And then we visited The Neighborhood of Make Believe, a whimsical puppet world in which a young prince had run away to stay with his friend, Daniel Stripèd Tiger, because he was worried his parents, the King and Queen of the Neighborhood of Make Believe, would divorce. When he was found by his friends, he was told that his mother and father might divorce, and they might not, but that if they did it could not be his fault and could not lessen their love for him.

Next, Mr Rogers spoke with a small, severely disabled boy named Jeff Erlanger. Jeff happily discussed his situation – relating the symptoms he suffered, the operations he had undergone and expected to undergo, and demonstrating the capabilities of his electric wheelchair – so that other children might understand, ‘You have a lot of things happening to you when you’re handicapped.’ Mr Rogers then sang with him a song, called ‘It’s You I Like’, in a sequence I believe is iconic in America. If it isn’t, it ought to be. It ought to be iconic everywhere.

The episode ended when Mr Rogers turned to his audience and told them something in a way that suggested they should remember it even if they forgot everything else he ever taught them. They had, he said, made today special simply by being themselves.

The sincerity and intelligence onscreen were astonishing. So was the slowness. In contrast to children’s TV today, much of which is edited like an action movie and maniacally loud, this programme was calm and deliberate. Its edits – never more, I learned later, than two in any minute – gave it an almost soporific rhythm.

Mr Rogers evidently understood what most who broadcast to children do not: that, of course, kids can be driven into frenzies by noise and nonsense and crassness and, of course, they will enjoy while it is happening. But it is not what they crave. What they crave is comfort, and kindness, and the security of knowing that those to whom they look for protection take seriously their every idea and emotion.

I wanted to see more – and so I began, in my 20s, to watch as many episodes of an old, American, children’s TV show as I could find and fit into my schedule. And each one astounded me. The base level of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is above the peak of any other children’s television programme I have seen. It ran for over 33 years and nearly 900 episodes, and Mr Rogers wrote, presented and scored them all.

To discover the show in adulthood is a joyous surprise – but a better one is to discover that the Mr Rogers who existed on the screen, the perfect neighbour who empowered all, was the same Mr Rogers who existed off it.

For decades, he was probably the most trusted man in America; generations of children would have done anything he told them to do simply because he told them to do it. Because of this he was an invaluable property for advertisers and, because of this, he refused ever to feature in an advert. Imagine for a moment the money he forewent by that decision.

Imagine, too, the number of letters he received in 30 years as perhaps the person to whom American children most wanted to write. He answered all for which he had a return address – and I don’t mean by this that he sent a perfunctory note and a signed photograph, although he certainly did send signed photographs. I mean that he wrote an engaged and detailed reply dealing with whatever issue the child had raised, from how to cope with divorce or the death of sibling, to whether or not he lived inside the television and if he’d like to come round for tea.

Often, he sent two letters for every one he received, writing to both child and parents.
The best of the letters to him, and the best of his replies, are collected in Dear Mister Rogers, Does: It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood? It is a perfect book – and, if you can read it without weeping, you are stronger than I.

Though he did not preach in his programmes, Mr Rogers was an ordained minister and was occasionally asked, by those who shared his Christian faith, but not his ability to embody its best elements, to denounce some group whom they felt deserving of derision, most famously homosexuals. Their argument was that their God hated gay people. His argument was that his God didn’t hate anyone, and loved all equally. He would not be an instrument of discrimination, or take any action that diminished either him or another. When he died, America mourned.

As evidenced by the preceding paragraph, every article about Mr Rogers seems, to those who know little of him, to stray into hagiography. This impression is unavoidable, but it also incorrect. The simple truth is that no worthwhile criticism can be made of his work and no believable criticism can be made of his character.

One of the reasons there is so much awful children’s television is that there is a lazy belief among both broadcasters and viewers that there is a limit to how good children’s TV can be. Mr Rogers knew and, more importantly, he proved that television aimed at children can reach the same standards as television aimed at adults.

Just as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Toy Story are every bit as good as The Passion of Joan of Arc or Casablanca, so the shows Mr Rogers made are every bit as good as I, Claudius or The World at War. Indeed, judged by the consistency of its quality, the nobility of its aims, and the grace with which they were achieved, Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood is, I think, the finest television programme ever made. That it is not broadcast in Britain impoverishes our children.

When we talk about children’s TV we seldom say what we want to see shown, or would like to see shown, but discuss instead what should be shown. This is because we all know, even if few of us ever acknowledge, that children’s television is the most powerful kind, absorbed as it is by the most precious people, with the most malleable minds, in our society. Anyone working in it accepts the heaviest responsibility in broadcasting – and in Mr Rogers they have an unimpeachable example of how that responsibility should be born.

I have many firm convictions about children’s television, but the firmest of them is this: the best method of making it is, in every circumstance, to ask oneself what Mr Rogers would do, and then to do it. This is also, incidentally, a rather good way to live one’s life.

Episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood are available on region 1 DVD, YouTube and at no charge to subscribers to Amazon Prime.

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