R/T 007 - Dance your cares away

This weeks Radical Thing is: Fraggle Rock and choosing joy as a professional strategy

Last night I was scrolling social media, and the theme song from 'Fraggle Rock' appeared in my feed.

It immediately sucked me through a vortex to my childhood. Warm and fuzzy feelings engulfed me. It was a feeling of pure joy.

Memories of sitting on my parent's sofa as a seven-year-old came flooding back. Watching the Fraggles on a Sunday evening was one of the highlights of my week.

I shouted my kids in from their bedrooms and petitioned them to watch the opening credits with me. They knew the words. This is not their first Fraggle rodeo.

The following day - I'm still smiling. 

From L-to-R: Mokey, Wembley, Gobo, Red, Boober - The Fraggles of Fraggle Rock

The Fraggles live in underground caves with their counterparts, the Doozers. We follow a group of characters with distinct personalities and quirks each week: daydreaming explorer Gobo, philosophical artist Mokey, indecisive worrier Wembley, superstitious pessimist Boober, and adventurous rabble-rouser Red.

The Fraggles also interact with two other worlds each week - ‘The Land of the Gorgs’ and ‘Outer Space’.

Fraggles access the Land of the Gorgs through a hole in the rock. Here, they forage for one of their two favourite foods, radishes, which grow in the Gorgs’ Garden. The Gorgs are shaggy, humanoid creatures about 1.8m high, towering over the Fraggles at a meagre half-metre.

Ma and Pa Gorg see themselves as "King and Queen of the Universe" alongside their son, Junior, who they see as the Prince. The Gorgs regard Fraggles as pests, as they steal their radishes, which are essential to create a cream that stops them from vanishing.

Junior Gorg almost captures the Fraggles

Also found in the Gorg's garden is Marjory.

Two rats, Philo and Gunge, accompany Marjory. You would reason that the rats are essential for her existence, as Marjory is a ‘sentient trash heap’ who imparts wisdom to the Fraggle clan when required. (Indeed, my parenting approach includes the line 'The trash heap has spoken' in the style of Philo and Gunge whenever I deliver my benevolent, fatherly advice.)

Back in Fraggle Rock, the Fraggles share their home with the Doozers. While Fraggles indulge in life's simple pleasures, working a thirty-minute week and playing, singing and exploring - the Doozers are their opposite.

Standing at a towering 150mm (6 inches), these small green creatures are industrious architects, engineers and builders. Using construction and equipment and hard hats, Doozers continuously erect constructions around Fraggle Rock, which the Fraggles eat.

Doozer construction materials are a Fraggle's second-favourite food.

The industrious Doozers

In one episode that particularly sticks in my mind, well-meaning Mokie convinces the Fraggles that eating Doozer constructions disrespects the Doozer community. With bellies grumbling, the Fraggles go on a Doozer diet to see the cave fill with their elaborate structures. 

Eventually, faced with nowhere else to build, the Doozers decide to search for a new home. As they prepare to leave Fraggle Rock, they explain to the Fraggles that they want them to eat their buildings, as this process creates more space to build.

The Fraggles live in a symbiotic, co-dependent environment with their little green counterparts.

The Fraggles observe a Doozer construction

The Fraggles also enter ‘Outer Space’ through a hole in a wall. You would have seen Outer Space differently, depending on where you were in the world.

In France, it was a bakery; in the American version, it was an inventor's workshop. In UK episodes, the Fraggles entered a lighthouse, the home to 'The Captain' and his wonderful dog, 'Sprocket'. (Our family dog also regularly gets called “Sprocket”.)

Gobo has to venture into Outer Space and avoid the "silly creatures' (Humans) to recover a weekly postcard from his Uncle 'Travelling' Matt. Matt's postcard is thrown in the waste paper when the Captain receives it, mistakenly believing it's for someone who used to live in the lighthouse.

The postcards blend into a video vignette of Matt waxing lyrical on the different tourist hot spots he is experiencing, alongside his interactions with "silly creatures" along the way: part memoir, part cultural ethnography. 

Uncle Travelling Matt may have been my first experience with the idea of travel versus having a holiday. When we travelled for almost a year to find our home in New Zealand, the avatar for my travel blog was - you guessed it - Uncle Matt.

Resting his weary feet - Uncle ‘Travelling’ Matt - “a reference to the ‘travelling matte’ technique used with green screen to give the impression a character is somewhere they are not.”

First aired in 1983, the Fraggles was the first of Jim Henson's shows created through an international collaboration of American, Canadian and British Studios. Connecting segments between the main Fraggle action were filmed in a different place, dependent on the geographical location of the viewer.

Henson described The Fraggles as "a high-energy, raucous musical romp. It's a lot of silliness. It's wonderful."

The show dealt with environmental issues, prejudice, spirituality, identity and social conflict. It addressed serious issues in a way that is accessible to children and enjoyed by adults.

In a world where we are constantly told to "grow up", we seem to equate joy, fun and silliness in our work lives as the antithesis of ‘professionalism”.

A public servant once told me I needed to wear a suit to be taken seriously.

For several years I thought this to be true and that I needed to fit into a corporate framing of success, credibility and professionalism. But when I look around at many of the biggest problems we face, people in suits bear some form of responsibility.

Professionalism is not about how serious we come across or the clothes we wear. It's about how we represent ourselves and our colleagues. It's how we support and champion others and their ideas. It's what we value and uphold as important. It's about personal integrity, the integrity of our relationships and that of our work.

Silliness, playfulness and celebrating our individuality are crucial for cultivating our creativity and sense of self. We can be at once silly and act with integrity, morale fibre and intellectual rigour.

In figuring out how to wrap up this weeks’ edition, I came across an article by Maria Popova on 16 years of writing the Marginalarian Newsletter. Here, she identifies 16 lessons she has learned. Number 14 goes like this:

"Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature."

In the face of what can seem like overwhelming, complex challenges we need to think in new, creative and sometimes silly ways.

Like the Fraggles, we should also choose joy wherever possible.