The Story Makers
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The Story Makers is a children's television programme broadcast on the BBC's small children's digital television network, CBeebies. The Story Makers is set in a children’s library, and encourages literacy and creativity.
The programme
The programme starts as the library shuts in the evening. At the stroke of midnight, Jelly and Jackson (green and pink puppets who live in the library and hide in the daytime) come out and are joined by a guest presenter, one of the members of the Wordsworth family, who recites "The sun is down, the stars are bright, Story Makers come out at night".
Objects found in the library are put into the top of the story machine (transformed from a desktop computer); Jelly, Jackson and the story maker then recite "Imagine, imagine, imagine a story!"; and the story machine produces a book containing a story based on the object. The story in the book is then "read out" (although this is replaced on screen by live action or an animation). The first story is a play story (live action with small children), and the remaining stories are animated (cartoons, stop-motion animation, or puppets). The characters in the stories are fairly consistent, including Scratch and Sniff (two puppet dogs), Blue Cow (a cartoon cow), Kevin the Space Boy (puppet), and so on. There is almost always a Blue Cow story and a Play Book--the third story varies.
As dawn breaks, the story maker takes his or her leave ("Dawn is upon us, the morning is nigh, story makers say goodbye") and disappears, Jelly and Jackson hide, and story machine turns back into a computer, but the books produced overnight remain for the librarian and children find when the library opens in the morning.
The story makers
The story makers include:
- Milton Wordsworth (played by Danny John-Jules)
- Byron Wordsworth
- Rossetti Wordsworth
- Shelley Wordsworth
- Blake Wordsworth (played by Paul J Medford)
- Webster Wordsworth
Each Wordsworth has magical story-making powers.
The Story Makers are all played by Black actors/presenters.
As is apparent, the story makers are named after English poets, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Lord Byron, Dante Rossetti (or possibly Christina Rossetti), Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and John Webster. It's possible the surname is also intended as an appropriate literacy pun (words' worth).
External link
- BBC Story Makers website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/characterpages/storymakers/index.shtml)