The blatant exploitation of loving Nannies! (In The Night Garden Magazine)

Member Name: i_am_joy

Product:	In The Night Garden Magazine
Date:	30/10/08 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice stickers and a good range of interactive activities for older children

Disadvantages: So expensive, cheap free gifts, not many pages, printed on thin paper

I took my 16 month old granddaughter shopping to Sainsbury's at the weekend and she was such a good little girl that I decided to treat her to a comic, when I saw an In The Night Garden comic from the BBC I popped it into the trolley for when we got home.

My granddaughter loves Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy and the rest of them so I was quite pleased to have bought her something she'd enjoy, and getting a comic as a child is always so exciting!

I was not so pleased when I got the comic home and opened the colourful plastic wrapper to get to the comic and free gifts. The comic at first glance is very thin and this edition has a quite dark cover, this wasn't particularly apparent in the supermarket and I would have much preferred a brighter and more colourful front cover to engage my granddaughter's interest.

The magazine comes with a sheet of stickers for the child to stick in relevant places throughout the pages, this is a lovely idea and we certainly had fun with the stickers but this meant that much of the colour was on the stickers so the comic had a rather dull and empty feeling until we'd jazzed it up with our handiwork. The stickers I found were perfect for little hands to use, my granddaughter is younger than this comic is intended for but even at her age she was able to stick the stickers into place when I pointed out where they had to go.

There are lots of landscape scenes of the garden with not as many pictures of the actual characters as I would have liked. It's quite an interactive comic as the child is encouraged to make observations, but I think this comic should be more fun considering the age of the children it is written for. My granddaughter was disappointed that she couldn't spot her favourite characters, and several pages had none of the loveable In The Night Garden characters on at all!

I was disappointed to find just one short story in the magazine, it's in a large enough font to cover four pages but is not a terribly good story at all and didn't allow me to have fun with my granddaughter, in fact she wriggled to get down off my lap halfway through the story which is unusual for her as she likes a nice story while she's drinking a bottle of milk.

For the older child there are plenty of pictures to colour in, in this issue there is a lovely one of Upsy Daisy which I planned to colour in but my granddaughter accidentally ripped the page. I shall colour in the Ninky Nonk instead.

This is a problem. This comic is aimed at very young children but for some reason it's printed on the thinnest and easily ripped paper imaginable. My older granddaughter collects the Felicity Wishes magazine and this is printed on much thicker glossier paper, which would be much more appropriate for the clumsy pre-schoolers this is made for.

Most issues come with a small free gift, in this issue was an Upsy Daisy bedtime toy and a 'mystery free gift' which turned out to be an inflatable beach ball (at the end of October). Do not be fooled by how great the Upsy Daisy thing looks in the packet, it's a nice enough finger puppet with an extremely poor quality bed made of plastic so thin that my granddaughter trod on it within minutes and it split. The ball is nice, but I have a suspicion that my cat had his eye on it earlier so no doubt it will be punctured before long.

But my main bugbear about this comic is the price! It annoyed me that the plastic wrapper covered the extortionate £2.35 price tag on this comic. Please don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge my granddaughters' anything but this comic quite simply is not worth the cost. Perhaps it's because my granddaughter is so young that I wasn't able to interact with her as much as I'd have liked, but really I think the BBC have published this poor comic with a view to making as much money as possible out of our little ones'.

I would not recommend this comic in all honesty because I simply do not believe it is worth the money. I recently bought my granddaughter a set of six board In The Night Garden books which are so much more colourful and fun, these cost me only £3.99 and I would suggest you put the extra £1.50 and buy these instead of this comic which I guarantee will soon be ripped and put in the bin.

Summary: For £2.35 I'm sure you can buy something better for your little one!