According to the makers of the new Japanese Sesame Street, cuddly little red fellow Elmo is to become an unstable emotional wreck, prone to regular bouts of weeping and chronic ’struggles with feelings of defeat.’

Rumours that Elmo is to instead into philosophical self-loathing after killing an elderly money-lender are as yet unfounded …

Producer Yasuo Kameyama has announced that the programme makers are ‘going for a deeper kind of character with a wider range of emotions.’ Kids in the Land Of The Rising Sun are smarter than their US counterparts, you see, thus negating the need for Elmo to gush forth all that pesky ‘reading and arithmatic’ nonsense.

Elmo – and remember, we would never be caught fibbing to you – is now being used ‘to depict emotional conflict’. The hard-as-nails grizzled Elmo in the American version of the show only wept once in his entire life. hecklerspray’s memory has been irrepairably scorched by the occasion – Elmo’s cherished goldfish had been found floating dead in its bowl, and the poor guy simply couldn’t contain his grief.

The new Elmo, however, has undergone something of a teary regression. Don’t misunderstand us … he hasn’t been made into a snivelling little wuss or anything. The reality is far more extreme than that.

From the sounds of things, Elmo has been made into an absolute raving lunatic; a seething crimson furball of barely-contained frustration and rage.

Just check out some of the details. In one new episode, Elmo bursts into floods of uncontrollable tears simply because a friend left without saying hello. In another – and in what sounds deniably like a drug-induced nightmare haze – Elmo has vivid, powerful dreams about ‘becoming a baseball player, a superhero and a dancer, but in the end deciding his true love is dance.’

Is there something the Japanese aren’t telling us? Doesn’t anyone talk to their neighbour over there? Surely the other residents of the Street have noticed this descent into madness and packed Elmo off to the chemists with a bulging pad of Prozac prescriptions.

‘Elmo is there to say it’s wonderful to be happy about living and enjoying life and the simplest things in life,’ claims original-voice-of-the-muppet Kevin Clash.

Not anymore he isn’t, pal. The days of innocence are numbered. Hecklerspray fully expects Big Bird to be offering sexual favours for crack in no time at all …

Can You Tell Me How To Get, How To Get To ,,,

Remember the good times – get a Hokey Kokey Elmo here

[story by C J Davies]