Bluey has escaped her downfall, for now

Like every other semi-sentient life form with access to iview, I think the fawned-over cartoon about a family of cattle dogs living in salubrious suburban Brisbane is delightful but one wonders how long this cross-generational juggernaut can continue before an inevitable fall from grace?

Maybe never, maybe Bluey will continue for decades, like The Simpsons (its own record-breaking longevity now a source of much derision), but portents for the plucky little Aussie show's downfall are gathering like summer storm clouds over a sub-tropical neighbourhood lousy with Jacarandas and anthropomorphic canines.

A few months back, the series, rather like a cat with nine lives, landed on its feet following a run-in with the rapacious cancel culture crowd after the ABC pulled two episodes for elements of apparent racism; and last week, in another boon for the insidiously addictive creation, the Bluey soundtrack became the first children's album to top the ARIA charts.

Two telling examples right there of a cultural phenomenon flying perilously close to the sun but an even more obvious indication of saturation point was the important bulletin from a few weeks back revealing Natalie Portman - one of a cluster of generous Hollywood A-listers in the country as part of the Hemsworth-led stimulus package - was spotted reading a Bluey storybook to her kids while enjoying a lazy cruise on Sydney Harbour (she's so down-to-earth and relatable).

The feverish dissemination and eager consumption of such a trusty news nugget - validation from a famous foreigner - still explains so much about the Australian psyche in general and, more specifically, our chronic cultural cringe.

Coincidentally, those behind Bluey have enjoyed so much success precisely because they have such a good handle on these dark corners of our national identity.

The show, blessed with self-awareness as much as a big heart, interrogates pedestrian family life (messy cars, losing a tooth, dead animals, waiting for a take-away meal) via a cast which endows the nuclear pack and various community members in its orbit with a canniness tempered by self-deprecation and fallibility.

But if there's a twin pillar to the cultural cringe, it's the tall poppy syndrome, which, shamefully, explains why a growing part of me is rooting for Bluey's demise before its interment within the National Film and Sound Archive or its journey into deep space so aliens can benefit from its universal brilliance.

I wonder which episode of the Emmy-winning program - like when the Fonz water skiied over that poor fish in Happy Days or the gaslighting relocation of Wandin Valley from NSW to Victoria in A Country Practice - will be the one associated with the lustre draining from Bluey's healthy and once-impervious coat.

Perhaps Bandit will get done for DUI after attending Summernats? Perhaps Chilli will run off with Uncle Stripe? Who knows? But I suspect, and weirdly hope, it will happen.

I wish I could overcome such base instincts; they're inimical to personal growth and remind me of that scene in Sunday Too Far Away when gun shearer Foley played by Jack Thompson (a perennial tall poppy) questions a colleague's sexuality because he's committing the unAustralian sin of reading and writing.

But it hasn't only been ever more bouquets for Bluey which have prompted me to think about working on my character flaws because, this week, we've been gearing up to host a children's birthday party; an exercise as self-probing and potentially scarring as any social experiment devised by a 1960s university psychology department.

These days, parties are turgid, overblown affairs which test your rectitude while simultaneously filling you with the kind of fear the parents of Nazi youth squad members must have felt when their children developed an overnight interest in diary-keeping.

It's through the prism of parenthood our better qualities are illuminated and our worst magnified and it's when that prism is buffed to a high sheen by the spittle of other people's supergrass offspring, the whole spectrum of your personality can be warped and refracted into a deformed, albeit recognisable, version of yourself.

When one of your own kids is being a jerk (which happens a lot at our place), you have no compunction in addressing the situation and, sometimes, you can be proud of your actions (firm and fair in that colourful-sweatered, 1980s sitcom way that ends with a valuable lesson and a tussle of the hair) and, sometimes, you can display somewhat less-edifying qualities (dastardly and selfish in that 10-gallon-hatted, 1980s Texas-based soap opera kind of way that ends with a bullet).

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But the playing field of discipline is completely upended when other children are involved and in such circumstances I find myself swimming in a milquetoast limbo of limp authoritarianism. If I'm not careful, the condition can give rise to a certain lame-duck parental pettiness, a particularly horrible state in which to find yourself when surrounded by innocents.

Kids may be stupid but they're lightning quick to recognise a nasty adult.

I can still remember when, as a seven-year-old on a sleep-over at a new mate's place, I was overenthusiastically watching M*A*S*H when I childsplained to all those assembled in the lounge room Hawkeye and Trapper John called their tent "the swamp".

"Yeah, we know," my friend's dad sneered. "We watch it too."

As public slap-downs go, it wasn't the worst, but it was full of venom and I wanted to leave immediately and feel the warm embrace of belittlement at the hands of my own family because the man of that suddenly unsafe house had made it clear he didn't like me.

It's unforgiveable to make a child in your care feel unwanted and, as my wife and I chaperone two vehicles' worth of nine-year-olds to a waterpark this weekend, regardless of their behaviour, I'll being doing my best to make each one of those children feel as part of the family as any of those unfortunate enough to have blood-ties with the excursion's 2IC.

Frankly though, on top of all the emotional enervation, parties, especially those off-site, are physically exhausting and, in another example of my crumbier side, I'm sort of hoping the heavens will open as predicted and all those sprats will just have to make do with a daggy, indoors birthday bash back home.

We'll just stick 'em in front of Bluey.