40-year-old entertainer

Happy birthday, Sesame Street. You are 40 years old now, just a year younger than Mickey Mouse was the year you arrived on television — and he was semi-retired by then, while you still report to work each day.

Yesterday morning you began your 41st season, you and your cast of ageing humans and ageless Muppets, with three first-episode veterans still in residence. Certainly there is no other children's show to match you for longevity, cultural penetration or global reach

Sesame Street, by contrast, was conceived from the beginning as an instrument of learning and uplift — a Head Start of the Air that would, by a sort of pedagogical jiu jitsu, use the force of an addictive medium to its own higher ends. It was largely, though never exclusively, meant to give a leg-up to disadvantaged kids, and to get parents involved by putting on a show that was also attractive to them. I was no longer a child nor yet an adult when Sesame Street began, but I was certainly attracted: It looked like nothing else on television, showcasing independent animation at a time when that art was elsewhere reaching new lows. And it had Muppets, who came from the world of grown-up show business and added — although it's odd to say — sophistication to the mix.

And then there was the setting: Where most kids' shows took place within some snug refuge, a Treasure House or a Nice Man's Living Room, Sesame Street is set out on the sidewalk, and therefore in a community, in what was clearly the city of New York — and not the Starbucked and Disneyfied Manhattan of contemporary commerce, but a funky working-class neighbourhood where laundry dries on clotheslines and trash cans sit by the stoop. Radically it prominently featured black actors (and Latin and Asian soon afterward). The series remains peerlessly multicultural and multicoloured — blue, orange, red, green, yellow, purple, all the primary and secondary hues, plus the usual variations on black, white and brown.

Still, every neighbourhood changes with time. Cookie Monster also eats fruit now. The teaching of letters and numbers has contracted into a couple of spots in the show — "40" was yesterday's number — and the old mosaic approach, an energetically ragtag olio of short films interlaced with a longer street-set story, has been streamlined into a relatively few discrete blocks.

Like New York itself, it is a tidier place than in 1969. Still, Sesame Street is not here to satisfy my aesthetic preferences or Grouch-like nostalgia for the mud. It is here for your children, and for all the right reasons.