The Story Makers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Story Makers
Genre	Childrens
Starring	Nick Mercer Aliex Yuill Danny John-Jules Michael Offei
Voices of	Nick Mercer Aliex Yuill
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Language(s)	English
Production
Camera setup	Multi-camera
Running time	15 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	CBeebies
Picture format	PAL
Audio format	Stereophonic sound
External links
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

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.

1 The programme
2 The story makers
3 Trivia
4 External links

[edit] 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 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.

[edit] The story makers

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 and is 3 years old.

Six Presenters:

Milton Wordsworth (played by Danny John-Jules)
Byron Wordsworth (played by Michael Offei)
Rossetti Wordsworth (played by Dystin Johnson)
Shelley Wordsworth (played by Lauretta Nkwocha)
Blake Wordsworth (played by Paul J Medford)
Webster Wordsworth (played by Joe Vera)

Each Wordsworth has magical story-making powers.

The Story Makers presenters are all played by actors.

The story makers may be 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. It is also possible the surname is also intended as an appropriate literary pun ("words' worth").

[edit] Trivia

The librarians seen at the start and end of the programme are played by the actors who provide the voices for Jelly and Jackson.
Although the Story Makers leave when dawn approaches, the clock in the library winds forward from 12.05am - well before the dawn. Mercer and Yuill also perform the puppetry, and provide some of the voiceovers for the characters and narrations from the storybooks.
In December 2007 Jelly and Jackson appeared on a puppet special of the Weakest Link hosted by Anne Robinson which was originally broadcast on Friday, December 28th 2007 at 18:00GMT on BBC1.