Even if you pay no attention to pre-school television, it’s quite possible that Mr Tumble has still managed to impinge on your consciousness, at least if you’re British.  Mr Tumble is the signature creation of Justin Fletcher.  And if anyone in pre-school TV counts as a megastar, it’s Justin Fletcher.

His shows are in near-permanent rotation on CBeebies.  He stars in three – there’s Mr Tumble’s home show Something Special, the sketch show Gigglebiz, and the pantomime sitcom Justin’s House.  But those are just the shows that he fronts.  He also crops up as a voice artist in Tweenies and Timmy Time.

Something Special wasn’t his first show, but it was his first star vehicle.  The format is as straightforward as it gets.  In every episode, the gentle, childlike clown Mr Tumble magically despatches his Spotty Bag to the real world, where Justin is doing something or other with some kids.  In the bag, there are pictures of three “special things” which Mr Tumble would like Justin and his friends to look for.

Roughly half of each episode is Justin looking for the “special things” along with the kids, and joining in with them in whatever activities they happen to prompt.  Actually finding them is not really portrayed as a challenge – you’re just supposed to point them out and wave or cheer in recognition.  The other half of each episode – the framing sequence and an extended sketch in the middle – is Mr Tumble, often with other members of the extended Tumble family, all also played by Justin Fletcher.  There’s a Grandad Tumble, a Lord Tumble, an Aunt Polly (a pantomime dame), a baker, a sailor – you get the idea.  And at various points in the show, we’re taught a new sign in Makaton.

Makaton is a sign language which was principally designed to be used alongside speech, by people with learning and communication difficulties.  But its creators say it can also be useful with young children more generally.  This is the unspoken central point of Something Special.  The children are all disabled, and while there’s some variation from show to show, the show doesn’t take the easy route in its casting; many are very seriously limited in their communication and their interaction.  But aside from the fact that Makaton is being used, nobody ever points this out or comments on it in any way.

When the show was first commissioned, it’s unlikely that anyone thought of it as a potential hit.  Its first episodes weren’t even aired in the children’s slot – they were consigned to the backwater of BBC2 schools programming.  Now, though, it sits happily in the CBeebies schedule, treated as a completely mainstream programme.

It’s not unprecedented for a show initially aimed at viewers with disabilities to reach a wider audience.  Vision On did it back in the 1970s, to the point where it span off the entirely mainstream kids’ art show Take Hart.  But Vision On‘s crossover appeal was easy to see.  Its remit was to entertain deaf children; its approach was to downplay language altogether and go for visual communication instead.  The result was a highly inventive and distinctive show with an obvious broader appeal.

Something Special doesn’t have that flash, but it’s equally distinctive in its own way.  Under the hood, it’s a very simple, traditional show of a sort that nobody else really makes any more.  A traditional, if gentle and unthreatening, clown does some physical comedy.  A nice presenter meets some kids and they look at some interesting things.  The simplicity is partly because the target audience are assumed to be working hard to follow it.   But on a pre-school channel, that applies to a lot of the younger viewers anyway.  Hence the potential appeal to the very young generally.

The show’s current positioning, as a mainstream show which just happens to have a lot of disabled kids, is in line with CBeebies’ broader approach of portraying disabilities as something everyday and unremarkable.  Disabled children show up on Swashbuckle from time to time, with appropriate modifications to the format.  Melody is basically an introduction to classical music, but has a visually impaired girl as its title character.  (Less obviously, the animations are also apparently designed to be extra-accessible to the visually impaired.)  And since 2009, the rotation of continuity announcers has included Cerrie Burnell, whose right arm stops just below the elbow.  The Daily Mail said it would scare the kids.  It doesn’t.

If anything, Something Special is vaguely unusual in featuring exclusively disabled children, but I suspect the alternative would involve an awkwardly wider age range.  Ultimately, the show has the nerve to commit to a very simple format.  And if you’re going to do something simple, you need to do it really well.  Fletcher does.  He’s a very good character comedian, which becomes more obvious when you see the wider range of characters he does for Gigglebiz, but it’s still readily apparent from the range of variations on Mr Tumble that he gets to play here.

There have been occasional attempts to try and take Mr Tumble beyond this format.  Fletcher certainly knows better than to try and install him in the comparatively rapid-fire world of Gigglebiz, where his languid pace would be totally wrong.  But there was a live show earlier this year, The Tale of Mr Tumble – filmed for CBeebies, like a lot of spin-off theatre – which tries to do an origin story for him.  I’m not going to say it didn’t work – the kids loved it, after all – but you really have to bend the character to make him into a protagonist.  He’s not designed for it.  Nothing about him cries out for a back story.  He is childlike and unchanging and his natural home is a five minute sketch in which he tries to find a missing hula hoop.  On Something Special, he’s comedy with training wheels for the very young, though with enough subtleties to make his segments pretty entertaining for the parents too.

The real-world sections call for something different.  You have to speak slowly and clearly to make it as easy as possible for the audience to follow.  Many of the children are very limited in their ability to interact with Justin.  Pitched slightly wrong, it could so easily seem awkward or patronising.  But it doesn’t.  It works because, above all else, it simply feels sincere – there’s a sense of genuine, unsullied conviction in what the show is doing.  There’s something wonderfully pure about it.

 

That’s one aspect of the Justin Fletcher empire.  Next time, Gigglebiz and Justin’s House.