Paint belongs in bouncy castles

First may I just say - W00t!!! 50 posts. Take that productivity!!!

Secondly, bouncy castles, though the suffix suggests a hard fortress of keeping people out, actually has the opposite effect. And I don't just mean that it has an inviting appearance that draws in everyone, presuming that they first have taken shoes off. Instead I mean the way they work during the bouncing.

Just taking the base in to the equation, the bounciest area is in the middle, which will average out to be lower than the areas around the edges. Not only does this mean that those in the middle more likely to stay there as they are in the lowest part, and it is very hard to bounce uphill. Secondly those on the outside of the divot will be bouncing on a slope, and will inevitably bounce inwards.

Now if we take in to account that the "castle" walls are also bouncy, then even those bouncees who are lucky enough to have bounced away from the centre will inevitably reach a wall, at which point their horizontal energy will be reversed in vector and they will be on a bee line for the centre point once more.

Now if this was a set of bouncing balls, turtles dropped from a high height or hand grenades mixed with tins of paint, the whole thing would be funny if at least watched from a safe distance. Instead, the objects ignorantly and chaotically bounding around on an imminent collision course is a set of humans.

And not just any humans, children. Bony, fragile, cry-at-the-slightest-things children. In a big bouncy death trap. It would be less dangerous, and less noisy to have just one child, one grenade, and one tin of paint bouncing around.

What a TV program it would make. Just one child, a loosely pinned hand grenade, a bucket of luminous green paint and 500 well protected, bullet time cameras.

The jumping luminescent death child boom paint fest - ITV at 10pm tonight.

Tell me that you wouldn't watch it.