All I Want to Watch Is Kids Crashing Their Parents’ Live TV Interviews
The thing that parents—especially mothers—are being asked to do right now is inhumane. Because of the pandemic, more parents are forced to do round-the-clock caretaking with no assistance or break while also working a full-time-job. It’s unfair and exhausting.
But it has also made for some very, very delightful viral videos. Moms accidentally revealing the extreme labor they are being asked to do while gifting us clips of their adorable children? Tiny people interrupting dreary newscasts to remind us that, beyond the fear and grief that seem to eclipse everything right now, there is still dear, joyful, innocence? We are here for this! We have, literally, nowhere else to go.
The hands-down best kid-crashes-live-interview clips came today, within a half hour of each other on British news, broadcaster Scott Bryan pointed out on Twitter.
On the BBC, Clare Wenham, a professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics, was attempting to explain public health strategies for lockdown on local levels as her daughter Scarlett performed the equally important work of moving a framed picture of a unicorn from a lower to a higher shelf—and back.
“Scarlett, I think it looks better on the lower shelf,” the BBC interviewer Christian Fraser adds, helpfully.
“Mummy, WHAT’S HIS NAME?” shouts Scarlett, beginning a dialogue between the toddler and the journalist.
Within the same hour, on Sky News, another British news channel, viewers were treated to this interaction between foreign affairs editor Deborah Haynes and her sophisticated negotiator of a son, who had arrived to politely demand permission to eat not one, but two biscuits. One party wished to speak about David Cameron; the other, biscuits. Guess who won?
These seconds-long videos have all the tension, climax, and payoff of blockbuster comedies with $30-million production budgets. The telltale turn of the door handle; the child’s flailing, prodding hands; the fading shock in the parent’s eye.
Runners-up include a confident entrance by U.K. chancellor Anneliese Dodds’s daughter—Dodds’s poker face should entitle her to some kind of parenting and/or acting award. Another classic—Israeli defense minister Naftali Bennett in late April, discussing the high-stakes issue of what role he might play in helping his country form a new government while his son hugs him. Of course, all of these videos owe part of their success to the mother of all viral kid interruption videos—the iconic interview with South Korea expert Robert Kelly on the BBC. The image of his daughter marching into his interview is the one I imagine they play on a loop in the waiting room in heaven.
These harried-professional-parents-surprised-by-their-overzealous-child clips are a world away from the staged scenes of celebrities being “interrupted” by their kids that have proliferated during the pandemic, most notably by Jimmy Kimmel, who has made “surprise” celebrity kid moments a recurring part of his show. It’s not just that those moments are totally wiped of suspense; they also just don’t work because celebrities don’t need to work every day to feed and shelter their children the way most people do.
Kid-interrupts videos isn’t a genre we hope lives forever, but as long as working parents are juggling this much, we’re glad that there is some very, very entertaining evidence. We’re sending all of you love, strength, and extra biscuits.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
