The Story Makers


The Story Makers is an educational children's television programme that was 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, Jackson and Jelly come out and are joined by a 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 or appear by magic are put into the top of the story machine ; Jelly, Jackson and the story maker then recite "Imagine, imagine, imagine a story!" and the story machine makes a book containing a story based on the object. The story in the book is then "read out". The first story is usually a Playbook, and the remaining stories are animated. The characters in the stories are fairly consistent, including Sniff and Wag, Blue Cow, and Kevin the Spaceman. There is always a Blue Cow story and a Playbook - the other story varies between each episode.
As dawn begins and the sun rises the Story Maker takes his or her leave 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. From Series 2-4, Jelly and Jackson sometimes look at what the kids or the librarian are doing during the credits, and hide to make it look like they are invisible to the humans. This never happened in Series 1.

Characters

The Wordsworth family members

The main live action presenters are the Wordsworths:
In Series 1, Milton Wordsworth was the only live action presenter.

Others

The show also featured two puppets:
The puppets have also appeared on CBeebies Springwatch and CBeebies Autumnwatch. Jelly was also a recurring character in Green Balloon Club, another show that aired on CBeebies.

Home media releases

In 2004, two VHS tapes and DVDs were released by Contender Entertainment Group under license from the BBC. The first volume contained five episodes from the series, and the second release was a "Bumper Special", featuring ten episodes, five on each VHS tape/DVD.

Stories

All episodes feature a Playbook and Blue Cow story. The other story rotates from the list below: