New Year’s Day just wouldn’t be right without Mary Poppins, even though the idiots in charge of television keep broadcasting it on the wrong day. We will not be thwarted though, we simply don’t watch it when they decide, and you can’t make us watch when you want us to Mr. BBC.

We still seem to have a fair amount of party food left in the house, so we loaded up the coffee table and sat down for what is in my opinion the third best film ever (The Blues Brothers being number one and It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World at number two).

Although I’ve seen this film hundreds of times before, I made a new discovery this time around. Actually it wasn’t so much a discovery as a theory.

We know that Mary Poppins (always the full name of course) arrived not so much to look after the children, but to sort out the lives of the family unit as a whole, mending the distant relationship between the children and their somewhat dictatorial father. However, I came to the conclusion that Bert arrived at the same time to help. We never learn anything about Bert’s home life, and he seems to always be in the right place at the right time to win the trust of the children and eventually (because the mother has an engagement, Mary Poppins has the day off, and Ellen the maid seemingly can’t be arsed and wouldn’t look after the children “for an ‘undred quid”) the parents. Surely Bert is magical too? Or maybe he and Mary Poppins are working as a team? The film provides very little in the way of a back story, but Bert is every bit as manipulative towards George Banks as Mary Poppins; the scene between them as Bert cleans up after filling the house with dancing chimney sweeps is one of the most moving exchanges in the whole film.

You're a man of 'igh position
Esteemed by your peers
And when your little tykes are cryin'
You 'aven't time to dry their tears
And see them grateful little faces
Smilin' up at you
Because their dad, 'e always knows
Just what to do

You've got to grind, grind, grind
At that grindstone
Though child'ood slips like sand through a sieve
And all too soon they've up grown
And then they've flown
And it's too late for you to give
Just that spoonful of sugar
To 'elp the medicine go down
The medicine go down, the medicine go down

(c) Disney

The above passage from ‘A Man Has Dreams’ is sung by Bert as if he is siding with George Banks, but is obviously intended as a criticism. Later in the film when the whole cast go out flying kites, he is suddenly a kite salesman.

It is a long time since I read the books by P.L. Travers, and I haven’t read every single one, so I can’t remember how significant a role Bert had throughout. I do seem to remember him being referred to as a match seller, but can’t remember much else.

With Bert being in all the right places, I therefore also wondered if that is the (unmentioned) reason for Dick Van Dyke also playing the part of Mr. Dawes Snr, because it is simply Bert in disguise. Mr. Dawes Snr did after all share the laughter/floatation affliction. Another theory is that Mr. Dawes Jnr is Bert’s father, and that Bert was cast out of the banking side of the family, and took on the guardian angel role alongside Mary Poppins, who is actually his sister. Although if they were siblings, there would be no need for Mary Poppins to thank Bert for never ‘pressing his advantage’ (an expression it took years for me to understand). Right opposite the bank where George Banks works, sits the bird woman. Is she another all knowing figure working with Mary Poppins and Bert to help people to ‘see past the nose on their face’? She could possibly be Mary Poppins’s mother, so if she and Bert are siblings, she is merely sitting on the steps to keep a guiding eye on her husband (Mr. Dawes Jnr) who doesn’t possess the family magic powers. Perhaps Mr. Dawes Jnr, in the final sequence, ‘gains his wings’ to reference It’s A Wonderful Life, in giving George Banks the promotion thus awarding him the magic powers. This could be why the bird woman (his wife) stops following him to work as she is no longer needed.

They also both called the laughing floating man ‘Uncle Albert’.

Although Christmas is never mentioned in the film, Mary Poppins has all of the elements that make up the Christmas film formula. George Banks is a combination of the distant workaholic father, and Ebenezer Scrooge; both too wrapped up in themselves to appreciate how much love there is in the world. Mary Poppins and Bert are doing the work of Clarence, (the guardian angel in It’s A Wonderful Life), Fred Astaire’s mysterious everyman in The Man In The Santa Claus Suit, and Buddy the Elf in making these people see that they play an important role in their family’s affections.

Right at the beginning of the film as the wind changes direction, Bert looks wistfully up at the sky and sings that he “can’t put me finger on what lies in store, but I feel what’s to happen all happened before”, an obvious reference to Mary Poppins coming to the rescue once again. When they first meet in the film, Bert recognises her silhouette on the pavement and she in turn remarks that it is good to see him again. Could Mary Poppins be either a time traveler, or a magically ageless woman of unknown age who was once Bert’s nanny? (The fact that she could have been Bert’s nanny in his childhood has been mentioned before somewhere, although I can’t remember where). I remember it being alluded to in the books that she could have also been George Banks’s nanny, but she operates some kind of memory wipe once she’s helped the family and upped sticks. That would explain why one minute Jane and Michael were crying at her for leaving, but when they went to fly a kite with their suddenly nice parents, they didn’t even look back, because she had made them forget.

On the other hand, maybe I should stop trying to analyse a children’s film?

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