Andrew Davenport

 

As a former speech therapist with a passion for theater, Andrew Davenport has always been fascinated with language, drawing and the use of comedy as a universal tool for communicating. He focused on these elements when creating and writing innovative shows for Ragdoll Productions—where he is creative director—that have become huge hits on the BBC and around the world: first Teletubbies for the youngest viewers (co-created with Anne Wood, Ragdoll’s founder), and more recently In the Night Garden, for preschoolers. Commissioned by CBeebies, the series has so far been sold by BBC Worldwide in more than 30 countries and has 60-plus licensees signed globally, with a DVD that has already sold a million units. Davenport is currently working on the multiplatform program Tronji, in which children aged 6 to 8 must solve problems to save Tronji World.

 

TV KIDS:What provided the idea for In the Night Garden?

DAVENPORT: I wanted to make a show that was about the imaginative space we share with children. The whole idea came out of personal experience: spending time as a very young child with my grandmother, who was really very imaginative. I was very lucky in that respect. At bedtime, she would take time telling me stories that she made up, often as she went along, as well as the more traditional nursery rhymes. One rhyme in particular was called “Walking Around the Garden,” which appears in the beginning of In the NightGarden. It involves circling your finger around your child’s palm in a little rhyme. The memories of those times have really stayed with me, and left a great impression—and as is often the case with childhood memories, the atmosphere of them is stronger than the detail. What I take from those distant memories more than anything is a feeling of security and warmth and fun—and most importantly, of being loved. And I think that came out of the fact that here was an adult taking the time to be silly and share little nonsense rhymes and to create a little world of imaginative stories. I think this means a lot more to children than we often appreciate. I was very keen that In the Night Garden should create and hold onto this atmosphere.

 

As a child, I also had a nursery rhyme book that I was very fond of. I loved the pictures and the world they engendered. I loved the fact that these eccentric little characters had their own little rhymes that encapsulated who they were, and that they lived in this funny nursery-rhyme community and were all very happy and free to express their own absurdist eccentricities!

 

Out of these memories, I could see beginning to emerge something that would contrast very nicely with Teletubbies—a sort of a silly nursery-rhyme community—a comical but very closely bonded and diverse community of absurd characters. That was really the starting point of the idea. It was to emerge from a bedtime-story context, not to make it a bedtime show, but in order to create an atmosphere—it’s a metaphor children understand.

 

TV KIDS:Words, music and rhymes have a distinct purpose in the show, don’t they?

DAVENPORT:They do, very much so, and that reflects the culture of the child. The target age group of In the Night Garden is slightly older than that of Teletubbies. At this age, children have learned enough about the world, and have built up enough language, to really take pleasure in turning everything upside down. This is, of course, where the classic nursery rhyme comes in. It uses all the fun elements of language, rhythm and rhyme and sense reversals, and gets them all around the wrong way, describing events that are often impossible, like cows jumping over the moon or old ladies living in shoes. It’s exactly what children at this age enjoy. It’s a uniquely human thing: children go very quickly from trying to grasp exactly how the world is and then go on to thoroughly enjoy imagining how the world might be if it was turned on its head. That was the starting point for In the Night Garden. The characters all have their own rhymes that describe, either in words or through a string of nonsense, who they are and what they do. Children quickly learn the rhymes, which then become an important point of contact with the character and the narrative.

 

TV KIDS:When you use the term “uniquely human,” do you believe this is an element that has made the show so successful in so many territories?

DAVENPORT:Probably!The advantage of working with a preschool audience is thatif you can manage to get a show right, it tends to work universally because all children in their preschool years are more or less interested in the same things, and they grow up by the same fundamental series of processes. The reason In the Night Garden works in so many territories is because the culture of childhood is a unique and universal culture in itself.

 

TV KIDS: Producers of programming for older children often tell me that after a child has been in school all day, the last thing he or she wants to watch on TV is something educational. How do you feel about that?

DAVENPORT:I think that is slightly underestimating children’s ability to take what they’ve learned, and to enjoy applying it to new situations. And it is slightly underestimating the power of good television to support and refer to educational content without necessarily making it a painful process.

 

Tronji is very much about making a narrative out of new forms of expression that the child is learning about at school: mathematical workings, diagrams, scientific concepts and language. Not only incorporating them, but making those the constituents of the narrative, so that through the story children are actively using these new ways of conveying information that they are learning at school.

 

It is all abouttaking children’s current culture and setting it within a playful context. Children can detect that this is a silly or playful, comical environment they are entering, whether it’s In the Night Garden for younger children orTronji for slightly older children. They feel much more confident to approach difficult ideas in this context. With younger children, for instance, it’s a well-established fact that new language emerges in playful situations first. This is part of the function of play. SoTronjicreates a playful, absurd and ridiculous world and navigates it using these new scientific and mathematical forms of expression.

TV KIDS:Because children are such multitaskers these days, is it necessary for a show to have an accompanying game they can play online or on their Nintendo DS?

DAVENPORT:Tronji was initially a response to a BBC call to create properties and brands for which no single platform was dominant. Tronji was always conceived as something that would be a greater whole, rather than beholden to an individual platform. Different platforms have different strengths. The television platform is a very good conveyor of narrative—showing the way the participating children can use their skills actively and collaboratively to create a satisfactory resolution. A gaming platform has a completely different set of strengths, communicating a different interpretation of the context, exploring the scale and complexity of the Tronji World.

 

TV KIDS: As a creator, do you keep eventual merchandising possibilities in mind when you are creating a character or writing the story lines to a show?

DAVENPORT:Of course you know that if the show is successful, the characters are probably going to end up as physical merchandise on a shelf. But you don’t consider that in terms of their design. The initial job is to create a character that will communicate itself visually. And for me it always starts from creating the character as a drawing. You start with the essence of the character, but you know that it is going to be a living, breathing, full-bodied thing on the television screen, and you know it is probably going to manifest as a costume and contain a human performer. As the character evolves from your drawing into a costume character—that’s one set of compromises and changes that take place. I always sit very firmly on the costume-design process, to make sure the appeal of that character is not in any way endangered by the transformation from the drawings, and that the essence of the character is preserved throughout. Of course, after that, should the program be successful, you are doing the same process with merchandising. The aim is exactly the same: to adapt that character to whatever form it’s going to be appearing in, whether it’s a plush or whatever. But the process is always the same: the character develops out of a drawing and then it is a series of adaptations to the context. But you have to sit very firmly on every stage to make sure that the thing that made you respond to the character in the first instance is preserved all the way through.

 

TV KIDS:Is there any part of the creative process that you enjoy most?

DAVENPORT:The whole creative process is intrinsically enjoyable, because it’s about starting the day without something and ending the day with something. There is particular pleasure in drawing out potential, whether it’s of a character, or of the team that you are working with. It’s an intensely creative setup, and there are obviously great stresses and multiple impossible deadlines, but at the end of the day, it feels like a privilege to be doing this kind of work. Because we all support each other, and we are all concerned with the same thing—starting with nothing, and ending up with something extraordinary, complex, funny, meaningful and, of course, enjoyable. What could be better than that!