The Story Makers

The Story Makers is a children's television programme broadcast on the BBC's pre-school 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". The Wordsworths together with Jelly and Jackson are the Story Makers.

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 usually a Play Book (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 Sniff and Wag (two puppet dogs), Blue Cow (a cartoon cow, created by Blue-Zoo), Kevin the Spaceman (puppet), and so on. There is 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, we've made our stories, so we bid you goodbye") and disappears, Jelly and Jackson hide, and the story machine turns back into a computer, but the books produced overnight remain for the librarian and children to find when the library opens in the morning.

Characters

The story makers include:

The two puppet characters:

• Jackson (voiced by Nick Mercer who also provides the voice for Blue Cow) - Jackson is pink and porcupine-like and 5 years old.
• Jelly (voiced by Aliex Yuill) - green with hair sticking out, Jelly resembles a bird and is 3 years old.

There are many different story types, most of which have an educational nature.

Six Presenters with their own magical powers:

• Milton Wordsworth - Magic power - wave in the air (played by Danny John-Jules)
• Byron Wordsworth - Magic power - finger click (played by Michael Offei)
• Rossetti Wordsworth - (played by Dystin Johnson)
• Shelley Wordsworth - Magic power - magic words (played by Lauretta Nkwocha)
• Blake Wordsworth - Magic power - Hat (played by Paul J. Medford)
• Webster Wordsworth - (played by Joe Vera)

The story makers are named after English poets, William Wordsworth, John Milton, Lord Byron, Dante Rossetti (or possibly Christina Rossetti), Percy Bysshe Shelley (or possibly Mary Shelley), William Blake, and John Webster.

In 2007, Jelly and Jackson appeared on a special puppet edition of the Weakest Link with 10 other puppets but were eliminated in the sixth round of play, and did not get a single question incorrect during the first five rounds of the game (during a between-rounds interview, Anne points out that it is because they live in a library), although they weren't the statistical strongest link during those rounds except round 4 where they did get strongest link.

Stories

•Blue Cow 1

•Playbook 2

•Sniff and Wag 3

•Barnacle Rock 4

•Kevin the Spaceman 5

•The Three Bears 6

•Super Baby 7

·Rain forest Tales 8

•Jack Sprat and the Treacle Cat 9

•Tales from Faraway 10

•The Spoons 11

External links

• CBeebies – The Story Makers at BBC Online
• The Story Makers at BBC Programmes
  
• The Story Makers at the Internet Movie Database
• The Story Makers at TV.com