OK so this one is fraught with rabbit-hole risk, so I’m going to have to keep it tight. That’s because it’s about very complicated cross-cultural interconnections and disconnections — boring really, with not much to reveal about life the universe or anything. As I so often have to say, though, bear with me — there may be some light at the end of the burrow — which we won’t be going down anyway, like I said.

Let me set the scene. We are in Zimbabwe, about 1974 or so, and it’s TV time. Our TV experience has no resemblance to pretty much any aspect of content consumption in these modern digital days: there is one channel; programming starts at 5pm and ends at midnight; and it’s all in black-and-white. All this on a screen about 24 inches (60.96 cm) across, powered by an array of glowing valves which takes five minutes to warm up and smells somewhat of dust and resin if you peer into the back of the huge cabinet in which the apparatus is housed.

In addition, in the olden days of which I speak, the country is subject to cultural and economic sanctions which meant most of what we watch on the box is likely to have been pirated overseas and smuggled into the country in defiance of UN declarations. And that means we are served some pretty odd programming choices.

For example, once a week, probably around the magical 5pm mark, a programme airs which we love but which in some ways is a mystery and a conundrum. First, it’s set in a former colony, like ours, so we feel a certain affinity. Then, it deals with wildlife and happenings in the bush, which we also feel we know something about. And it reflects the experiences of white people in these situations, which is pretty much all we know.

The show is Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, a weekly dose of adventure and heartwarming happy endings involving a young boy, Sonny, and his preternaturally gifted orphan kangaroo sidekick.

Their adventures are similar to those Famous Five and Secret Seven tales we devour — emergencies thwarted by small children and their pets; criminals outwitted and brought to book through incompetence and the intervention of small children and their pets; the immutable principle that crime can never prosper . . . and that small children and their pets with right on their side are invincible.

Critics have pointed out that there is a whole TV genre of this kind of thing, with Lassie the dog and Flipper the dolphin following a very similar model. In all three, the animals are endowed with unnatural intelligence and communication abilities. “What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s fallen down the well?”

Let’s leave aside that insistence on anthropomorphising these furry sidekicks, which we have previously dismissed. Rather, it’s tempting to speculate that these beasts represent each child’s animalistic alter ego: the physical manifestation of a repressed desire to run, swim and defeat the aspects of the adult world that frighten and confuse them.

Or these shows could be an unknowing treatise on the nature of colonialism, where the natural world and its workings are subject to the western coloniser’s gaze, ordering what seemed strange and unique into a pre-existing, imported system of assumptions and values.

Or, in the fine tradition of fan fiction, one might posit that the children are insane and the animals exist purely in their tortured imaginations. This interpretation is ripe with possibilities: is Timmy down the well because he’s desperately seeking attention from an emotionally remote father figure? (Sunny has no mother and early seasons of the show have few female characters.)

Of course, as children we took these shows at face value, as they were meant to be taken. We tried to emulate Sonny: to whistle with a leaf or blade of grass between our thumbs, just like he does in the opening sequence; we believed kangaroos could open doors and communicate using a ‘tsk tsk tsk’ noise (in fact they don’t make that noise at all); and we kept a keen eye out for robbers and smugglers in our own daily round, as I have mentioned.

Above all, we hero-worshipped big brother Jerry, the helicopter pilot. He was the epitome of cool — nothing could be more glamorous than swooping godlike from the heavens to save the day. We rued our parents’ poor planning that hadn’t provided us with an older brother in this mould (and worse, had instead spawned older sisters who were good for very little at all).

The bush backdrop seemed somewhat like our own environment — or adjacent thereto — but also mysteriously different. Kangaroos were not much seen in the African savanna; similarly wombats, possums and wallabies. But to be fair, the existence not too far away of lions, elephants, buffalo and wildebeest was almost as much of an abstraction to us clustered around the TV in our suburban bungalows.

Even so, we had the broad strokes all around us: wide-open spaces, big skies, birds, tortoises and hedgehogs. As children, thanks to Skippy and its like we could still believe that this world was a benevolent Eden — full of wonders and potential friends.

At the same time, we had that thing Skippy conjures with all the time: the mystery of the bush; the dangers lurking just out of sight: venomous snakes, abandoned mine workings, extreme weather events. South African poet Sydney Clouts summed up this symbiosis of beauty and danger in Africa by calling it ‘the violent Arcadia.’

And among the feared, unpredictable elements is the unspoken: the native occupants of the land, virtually invisible in most of Australia but the vast majority in Zimbabwe — the equivalent of the Famous Five’s suspicious foreigners, smugglers and poachers, reduced to a faceless cypher with malevolence its only characteristic. How tragic that to them, we are the destructive interlopers (but we write the scripts, eh?).

This is at the heart of what these shows are about, I think: establishing that nice, safe, ostensibly superior relationship with the country that we feared. The message was that no hazard was too extreme to be tamed — and a domesticated kangaroo is the perfect symbol of that. Once a week, all terrors can be resolved and order restored in a forty-minute episode which ends with everyone laughing.

I’ve read that Skippy was a hit all over the world, so there’s no real mystery about its appearance in an obscure corner of Africa. And if you think about it, by happy accident we did have all those broad commonalities with the programme; imagine how exotic it must have seemed to audiences in Quebec, where it was dubbed Skippy le kangourou! Or to UK kids during the long, dark nights of winter — or in Czechoslovakia, in the grey depths of the cold war.

Watching an episode recently, it struck me that the world of Skippy, the Australia of the early-to-mid ’60s, is also a foreign land to us here today. So much has changed. The passage of time has transformed this country into a modern, diverse, multicultural society.

Time has also rendered that old Bulawayo home a sepia-toned memory; now the Aussie bush is just down the road and kangaroos race me as I toil on my mountain bike up Gillamatong. The wide valley below and the broad sky above can still inspire awe, but that vision of an Eden is long gone. When rabbits scamper across my path, I can’t help but see them as vermin, introduced in one of the worst ecological errors this country has suffered.

Skippy may have been wildly popular in its day but it hasn’t dated well. We’re more jaded these days; we’re also more conscious of the complexities our colonial past has bequeathed so many countries. It’s hard to entertain nostalgia about that level of naivete, which didn’t try to account for the nuances of our world. If our outlook is less comfortable now, at least we tell ourselves that we’re seeing things more clearly — in full colour, if you will.