DECODE Explores Family Ties

DECODE Enterprises has notched up sales in territories such as Australia, Poland and Canada on the live-action preschool series Grandpa in My Pocket, a CBeebies commission.

The special effects-laden Grandpa in My Pocket has been a stand-out success in the U.K. on CBeebies, which has already commissioned a second season. The show, distributed by DECODE Enterprises, delivers strong viewing figures, lively website activity and a regular top spot on the CBeebies iPlayer. The 52×11-minute series has been sold to Canada’s TVO, Al Jazeera Children’s Channel and Australia’s ABC TV, among other broadcasters, and also airs on CBeebies international channels around the world.
The show grew out of a seed of an idea from Mellie Buse and Jan Page, the founders of Adastra Creative, who set out to explore the familial bond between a grandchild and grandparent. "It’s such a wonderful and precious relationship and it’s also very universal and quite magical," says Buse. "We thought that it would have huge family appeal, which we’ve been gratifyingly proved right on. It was an area that hadn’t really been explored for that 4-to-6 age range, certainly not in the U.K."
The idea to flip the relationship—making Grandpa the naughty mischievous one and the kid more like a responsible adult—helped open up story potential. "If you’re going to be screening on a preschool channel, you can’t have kids who are too naughty, they can’t climb trees, they can’t swing from things," explains Buse of certain compliance issues. "Story potential is pretty limited. But if you’ve got a naughty grandpa, you’re freeing that up a lot."
The third stage of the thought process was to make the show "more high concept." Thus, Grandpa was given the ability to shrink down to a miniature size, using the powers from his magical shrinking cap. "As soon as we shrunk him we thought, now we have even more story potential because he can get under the floorboards, he can get in the tea pot, he can get anywhere," says Buse.
At the time the show was conceived, about seven years ago, special effects were hugely costly. Accordingly, the series was pitched as an animated project. Michael Carrington [the controller] at CBeebies loved the idea, Buse recalls, but said that it had to be a live-action show or you’d never get the emotion and reality out of it. "We went away and we waited for the technology to catch up with us, and it did. It suddenly just became affordable, and it just became affordable to do at the moment that Michael Carrington put out the cry for live-action comedy for 4-to 6-year-olds. It is a bit of a fairy tale in that respect, but that’s how it came to be."
The comedy-drama is filled with comic mayhem, as Grandpa shrinks down and creates mischief, which his grandson, Jason Mason, is often caught in the middle of. Keeping the series in live action not only helped give it the emotional realness for the grandparent-grandchild relationship, but also offers preschoolers a bit of a departure from much of what’s on in the TV landscape. "Preschoolers are not used to seeing anything real—they’re used to seeing puppets or suited characters or animation," Page points out. "If you have something that’s real, old fashioned story telling in a sense, with a real family and real relations—albeit rather heightened and elevated with a lot of comedy—I honestly think that’s what’s resonated internationally with it."

To watch a clip of Grandpa in My Pocket, please click here.