Pre-School

The Story Makers & Public Services

51YVQVZ0FZLWritten by Tom
A reading of the Cbeebies series The Story Makers in relation to Monday’s post on Fun Song Factory, discussing its representation of reading and social services.

Last post, I talked about the theme of capitalism in the direct-to-video pre-school series Fun Song Factory. While I was writing about how the Fun Song Factory works by putting base materials into a funnel and having songs come out the other end, I found myself immediately reminded of another pre-school show in which base materials were put into a funnel and transformed into a piece of media. And look, if I ever get the chance to talk about The Story Makers, I’m taking it. I love this show with all of my heart.

The Story Makers is a Cbeebies pre-school show produced during the early 2000s (when my sisters were born, in case anyone was wondering why I was watching it). The series is set in a library. Every night, the library shuts and three figures come out to play – two puppets called Jelly and Jackson and Milton Wordsworth (played by Danny John-Jules, best known as Cat from Red Dwarf). Together, they take things left by library residents, feed them into the library computer and produce new storybooks out of them. Each book would be one of a series – either a Blue Cow book, a Kevin the Spaceman book, a Sniff and Wag book, etc. – and they’d always be read out once produced (by which I mean the actors would start reading the book, at which point the show would fade to a narrated short film which represented the book’s contents).

The series is frankly magical. The dark library setting, the fact that Milton Wordsworth is a literal wizard, and the poetic tone to the whole thing just carries with it a sense of mystery and majesty. It made writing and reading seem genuinely wondrous; I have to imagine that a lot of currently budding artists and writers watched this as children.

But because we’re here and I’ve got a blog to write, let’s have a look at some of the show’s political subtexts! And because this is pretending to be some form of series, let’s define those subtexts in relation to Fun Song Factory. Because honestly, if I ever get the chance to write something comparing the political subtexts of Fun Song Factory and The Story Makers and I decide not to do it, I have officially grown up and thus lost all sense of myself. (more…)

Fun Song Factory & Capitalist Production

Written by Tom
A quick tour down memory lane, discussing how the experience of watching the Fun Song Factory series has changed over time and investigating the theme of capitalism within it.

Two questions probably occurred to you when you found I’d written an article about Fun Song Factory: a) What the hell’s Fun Song Factory?, and b) Is Tom now going out of his way to write things no-one will want to read? To answer the second question first, yes I am. To answer the first question:

Fun Song Factory was a direct-to-video series aimed at the pre-school market. Set in the eponymous Fun Song Factory, a factory which manufactures nursery rhymes, each video featured a bunch of presenters (alongside a backing troupe of kids) working in the factory to produce songs which they then performed to both the studio audience and the people at home.

I remember watching these videos a lot as a child. I believe I had a complete set, though I particularly remember watching the one where they went to a farm a lot. Not that my memories can be particularly trusted, of course: when I think back to watching it, I picture myself sat in a place that’s definitely my childhood living room but which has been painted to look like my childhood bedroom, implying that my memories of that video are made of at least two separate screenings which my mind has stuck together. A lot of my childhood memories are wrapped in watching these videos.

Revisiting it as an adult is quite an odd experience though, much like revisiting anything from your childhood is: the critical eye you didn’t have as a baby denatures the show so that the flaws you never noticed before stand in stark contrast to the bits you actually remember. The fact that the pre-school kids in the audience of the early videos obviously have no idea where they are or what’s happening is something I’ve never realised before; nor did I realise that the later videos don’t have a studio audience at all. There’s also the denaturing aspect of history. The fact that one of presenters is Dave Benson Philips is delightful – the man lights up the screen whenever he’s on it – but Philips has become a bit a tragic figure to me. After a heyday as children’s entertainer extraordinaire, his career sorta imploded until he at one point was literally willing to work for gravel. There’s also the fact that one of my best friends broke up with his girlfriend after we all spent an evening listening to one of Benson Philip’s children CDs. His girlfriend obviously loved the CDs while he just didn’t get why any of it mattered. In retrospect, their ending was inevitable and had been a long time coming, but it was Benson Philips who was the final straw, proving that they no longer saw the world in quite the same way anymore. Dave Benson Philip’s clowning stands the test of time, but it’s a clowning I’ve linked to time’s inevitable collapse. (Is that enough bathos? Then I’ll move on.) (more…)