Explicit Content and Curious Minds

Shortland Street clearly has a racy, new writer. Over the past few weeks the PGR show has been raunchy, hilarious and, well, inappropriate for its younger audience.

So engrossed are we in our weekly, usually family-friendly, soap fix, that I hadn’t stopped to check whether the content was suitable for under ten’s. While the ambulance was rocking from side-to-side from the shenanigans within, much to the Shortland Street CEO, escorting important visitors around the premises’ mortification, I was slapping my knee in hilarity, oblivious to what must have been going through the heads of my three.

It wasn’t until this week when Miss Seven questioned a storyline about the customised renamed Fitbit – ‘Trick-Track” that I realised what they were drinking in. “Why is that so funny mummy?” she asked, which stopped me mid knee-slap.

Oh gee, how could I explain that? You see, there’s a bit of a fitness challenge going on at Shortland Street at the moment whereby some of the characters wear these ‘Trick-Tracks’ and sync them to their phones to follow their and their peers’ daily activity.

In a bizarre storyline, a particularly meddling mother, used the tracker to check on her daughter’s state of nocturnal marital satisfaction. It wasn’t looking good, so the meddling mother went about setting up an intimate date for them while babysitting the kids. Once the daughter twigged what her mother was up to, her and hubby rigged it to look like they had been super-active all night. That alone wasn’t the cause of the knee-slapping – other scenes followed, which I will spare you.

But back to Miss Seven’s question: given the fact that it was an hour-long episode and I’m brain-dead come 8 o’clock, I was stumped. I looked over at Master Ten, who had a pink-cheeked smirk on his face and realised he must’ve had an inkling. Master Seven was oblivious and engrossed in his ipad but Miss Seven just wouldn’t let up. Eventually she was given some feeble explanation about going to the gym at night, which I’m not sure she bought, given there’s nothing funny about that so it was a bit of a wake-up call as to my own parenting complacency.

I’m lucky they didn’t question the rocking ambulance but, while myself and, according to social media, others are clearly enjoying this writer’s humour, I’m not keen to explain what they have next up their sleeve so think I’ll start recording Shortland Street for later and go back to reading the more innocent Famous Five and Pippi Longstocking stories during prime time.