Yes, last time I said this was going to be Katie Morag.  But there are two shows on CBeebies set in the Inner Hebrides, and they couldn’t have much less in common, which is kind of interesting.  Balamory is aimed squarely at the nursery crowd.  And Katie Morag isn’t.  And it makes sense to do Balamory first.

Balamory was one of the first major commissions of the fledgling CBeebies station in 2002.  It doesn’t show its age too badly – some of the CGI in the credits is starting to look a bit ropey, and the nursery computer is visibly of an earlier generation, but otherwise it holds up.  It ran for four years, and while the precise number of episodes seems to vary depending on which source you look at, everyone seems to agree that it’s somewhere north of two hundred and thirty.  And by some accounts, even then, the main reason for ending it was that the cast wanted to move on.

Like many of the best shows for the very young, Balamory is a format show, which plugs its stories into endless variations on the same formula so that the viewers can follow along nicely.  Balamory itself is a Hebridean village where all the regular characters live, in their own brightly coloured houses.  It was shot in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, which already had lots of coloured houses, making life much easier for everyone.

There are eight regular characters – Miss Hooley the nursery teacher (who is effectively the host and narrator), Spencer the painter, Archie the inventor, Edie McCredie the bus driver, Josie Jump the fitness enthusiast, Penny Pocket and Susie Sweet the shop/cafe owners, and PC Plum, who has so little actual crime-solving to do that he appears to mostly occupy himself with cycling and birdwatching.

So this is the format.  As the credits end, we see Miss Hooley leave her house and walk to either the nursery or the cafe (depending on whether she’s working that day).  Once there, she greets the viewer and lets us know what the weather is in Balamory today.  Character A comes by and establishes a problem.  It is decided that character A should visit character B, who may be able to assist.  Character A then “Which Coloured House Are We Going To?”, inviting the viewer to speculate on which coloured we are going to.  In a calypso.  Character A then goes to Character B’s house and, after further discussion, we establish that Character B is unable to help, but that Character C might be the one to try.  Character C will then do their theme song (all of it, with the middle eight and the fade out).  Character A visits Character C and recaps the plot.  Character C then saves the day by joining A (and sometimes B and Miss Hooley) in solving the problem using their own particular skill.  So Archie will show you how to make something, Spencer will do something arty, you get the idea.  Generally some nursery children are involved at this point.  Miss Hooley then recaps the story again, and goes home to end the episode.  Pretty much every standard episode is like this.  Sometimes a guest character shows up, but not often.

The genius of this is that, while it’s entirely predictable on one level, it’s also vastly flexible, because there are so many permutations in there, and a virtual infinity of problems that you can use as a set-up.  Of course, if you’re devoting that much time in every episode to the songs, they need to be good.  But they are.  Balamory is earworm central (and they refreshed some of the songs after a couple of years, too).  More to the point, though, the show is diligent both in taking advantage of all the available variations, and also holding some of them back for special occasions.  So, as I mentioned, the credits sequence ends with Miss Hooley leaving her house.  They need two versions of that, depending on whether she’s going to work or to the cafe.  But because she then goes on to talk about the weather, they actually need several more, because the credits do indeed change to reflect what she’s going to say about the weather.  It usually seems to be sun or rain, but there are other options that crop up when the plot requires.

Infuriatingly catchy, isn’t it?  Even if the lyrics do rattle away at a speed sure to defeat half the target audience.  The individual character songs are pretty memorable too.  Here, for example, is the original effort for PC Plum, in which the nature-loving police officer introduces himself via the most random genre imaginable.  Line dancing.

Now that’s pretty good.  But later on they decided to give him another song, one that plays up the police angle a bit more.

This is what they came up with.

 

I’ll just let that sit there.

So.  Balamory is fantastic, and, in its way, quietly insane.  These are characters who, faced with the question “what shall I do with this dog I’m looking after”, have to visit three people over twenty minutes to come up with the answer “go to the park”.  Another recently aired episode saw a similarly convoluted chain of reasoning to get from “Where can we buy fish and chips?” to “A fish and chip shop.”

And that doesn’t matter in the slightest, because the adults of Balamory are adults as seen through the eyes of very small children.  Inner lives are not in issue here.  But since all the characters have to interact with real children when they’re doing the activity sequence at the end of an episode, there’s an interesting balance in terms of how broad the performances can go – especially Miss Hooley, who’s meant to be their nursery teacher, after all.  At least in the episodes I’ve seen – which come from the earlier series – it’s  always played straight, but occasional moments of completely adult delivery and timing verge on the deadpan.

By the same token, Balamory is interested in the island as a format, not as an actual place.  It could as easily be a small town; what it needs is the small regular cast and the coloured houses.  With that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the show was cast with an eye on far broader levels of diversity than would actually be found on the Isle of Mull (or anywhere else in Scotland, for that matter).  This is not a show about re-creating a time and place.  It’s a show about slightly mad child-people doing songs and solving problems with group activities, which it does wonderfully.

Next time, however, a show which is interested in the inner lives of its adults and in building a time and place.  Katie Morag.