Adventures in Youtubeland By Steve Way

 

As children’s writers we often aim to create new worlds and new dimensions. I’ve been wondering lately if a utopian land, that I’m certainly not a resident of, called Youtubeland exists.

Recently a friend of ours very kindly gave us a smart TV that she was no longer using.* As her various streaming accounts, such as Netflix etc. were still linked to the TV, I turned to Youtube to find out how to return it to its factory settings, so that we could erase her accounts and start anew using ours.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long to discover videos explaining how to do this. The instructions were along the lines of; ‘Click on this option, this page will appear, click here, this second page will appear, click here… and so on a few times and then Hey Presto, factory settings will be restored!’

I don’t know if you’ve had the same experiences as me, perhaps you unconsciously own passports to Youtubeland and all works for you as on the videos. In my case, as on previous similar occasions, when I tried this in real life, it didn’t quite work out that way. I carried out the first instruction, I clicked on the named option but even though I’d seen the page in the video appear on the same model TV as ours, a completely different page appeared instead. Not for the first time I fell at the first hurdle.

What I fail to understand is why based on the same action, one screen appears on the TV in Youtubeland replaced by a totally different one in what appears to me to be reality (we’re getting philosophical here.) It’s the same with the ‘watch how we make something complicated appear really easy’ videos. For me these activities remain complicated and fraught with various frustrations and difficulties, accentuated since it appears they don’t exist in this parallel reality.

I suppose when it comes down to it, we’re exposed to many odd apparent ‘other’ worlds, starting with the inappropriately named ‘reality’ shows where participants are thrown into largely unreal environments. There’s also Cooking Competition Land where food has to be prepared that no longer looks like food and is manhandled onto the plate by hand. (I don’t know about you, I don’t care how posh the food is, I wouldn’t want anyone fiddling about with it by hand before serving it.) Also, House Renovation Land where, no matter how badly things seem to be going at some stage, without fail the house always ends up looking like a five star show home. Meanwhile out here in what I perceive as reality (here I go again) the vast majority of renovations are fraught with far more problems and often end up incomplete or imperfect.

So maybe sometimes when we’re thinking of creating imaginary worlds different from our own, perhaps they could be closer than we think.

By the way we did get the TV sorted out in the end, mainly with the help of our teenage grandchildren.

*We’re very lucky when it comes to friends – see last month’s piece about tea bag deliveries!

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Despite my trials and tribulations, I have ventured into Youtubeland in my own ways. You might enjoy this poem about flat shapes;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Koo5U4eLDss

Or possibly my silliest poem…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7eci8Bc98U0