THE Sindy doll has been revamped. Out go the killer heels, teeny weeny waist and short skirts to make the builders wolf whistle; she’s back with a pre-pubescent body and, often as not, lolls about in her onesie eating Wotsits.
The question is, does she go out to buy the morning milk in said pyjamas? It’s heartening to see a doll that looks like a child instead of one with the impossible curves of a Gisele Bundchen.
It’s great that Sindy is more like a little girl now; no more hosting dinner parties for her – hooray. Ditch the prawn cocktail, girl. She doesn’t have to dress up as an air hostess either. Give the children back their childhood, I say.
But, just to be clear, Sindy was never my top favourite doll. I didn’t have one. I liked my mini-typewriter – tip, tip, tapping away, whirr goes the ribbon and oh, the heartening whamp as you whack the handle, the roller thurrs back and you proceed to the next line.
I also liked my little sewing machine and other “creative” toys – hands up all those suckers for painting by numbers and spiroscope and potter’s wheel.
The only doll I ever remember playing with was Tin-Tin from Thunderbirds. Sure, she had an impossibly raunchy figure and long straight dark hair that a ginger like me just yearned for. But she wore trousers, never skirts, and she was an all-action and brainy kind of chick – a science nerd who knew her way round the Mole – as well as TB1, TB2 and TB3. She probably knew her way around Alan Tracy too.
She was the kind of gal who probably had a first in neuro-something or other from Yale. She was more than a match for those nerdy Tracy brothers.
As for soppy Sindy, she never slept her pretty little head upon my pillow, nor indeed, occupied the shoebox under the bed. Firstly, she seemed like a poor relation to Barbie. Sindy was the country bumpkin cousin.
Just in the way that America had Elvis and Cliff Richard was the local clean-cut version closer to home. Sindy was what you settled for – a Barbie with the “raunch” surgically amputated. There was no tiger in her tank.
Apparently, the rebirth of Sindy is aimed at appealing not just to the little girls but to their parents. But isn’t that what all toys are about? Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, is it?
A man on the radio said his wife had always wanted a Sindy when she was a child but never got one. When they spotted one at a car boot sale, she was overjoyed and set out on a journey that led to a whole 200 Sindys to play with. Yikes.
Said man was delighted for his wife but in my head, there is a picture of 200 small plastic pals piled up on the pillow – imagine clambering through a sea of plastic hands and legs and weird swivelling dolly heads to get under the duvet. It’s a nightmare.
Perhaps we all buy our children the toys that we once loved. Maybe I’d have liked a little girl so I could have dressed her up in a blue velvet trouser suit like Tin-Tin. She would probably have protested. But then I would too, if my mother had imposed her wishes on me.
She was talking one day about her own childhood and how she had yearned for a little wooden bat with a long bit of elastic and a ball attached. They were all the rage when she was a child, long ago – and I remember them myself from childhood days.
Times were hard back then but her mother took her over to town and bought her one, as a special treat. Back home, she went with her mother to visit an elderly woman who lived close by. She took her little bat and ball with her and showed it to the woman.
“There child, give that to me,” said the old woman, who promptly fetched a pair of scissors and snipped the ball off its elastic before handing it back to my mother.
“That’s fixed now,” she said. But it was broken really – and my mum still remembers her surprise and disappointment... with a smile.
