Viewers of last night’s episode of Sesame Street raised concerns with Ofcom and the FCC as beloved muppet Elmo was seen being taught the alphabet by a current celebrity looking to improve their public image for the 157th time.

While being instructed in the ABCs by David Corenswet, Elmo bafflingly made no reference to the litany of other stars who had made similar efforts. There was no OJ tribute, no reminiscence about being warned of the treacherous perils of ‘elomonopee’ by pre-presidency Ronald Reagan, and most concerningly no evidence that he had retained one iota of basic information from one week to the next. This is particularly worrying as he ended the lesson with the refrain: ‘now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me’; a clearly false announcement given he has evidently NOT internalised the alphabet, and will also presumably continue his pattern of cruelly shunning the memory of the efforts of whichever teacher he has enlisted from one week to the next.

Other members of the street are exhibiting similarly worrying signs, which has led to concerns that there is a wider city infrastructure issue in the local area. The much beloved but deeply troubled ‘Cookie Monster’ has had to relearn impulse control on a weekly basis, with the emotional workload of an intervention for his addiction issues repeatedly put on a rotating cast of small children. Similarly ‘The Count’, if he is as much of a numerical enthusiast as he claims, would be expected to have at least mastered basic integration by this point. That he is still barely scratching the surface of multiplication suggests serious issues with his educational environment, while his persistent Transylvanian accent despite having been built in Long Island and raised in Manhattan is a potential indicator of severe brain damage.

One explanation for the local concentration of this issue is that recent cuts to PBS funding by the Trump administration may have seen a number of crucial systems and comedically large Rube-Goldberg style contraptions that fire out fluffy shapes fall into dangerous levels of disrepair. With a number of streaming services considering purchasing The Street, we can only hope that they provide the necessary capital to repair its gas line (pending council permission) and purchase a Mathletics subscription for the Count, methadone for the Cookie Monster, and professional neuroscientific help for Elmo.

Eddie Atkinson