New Preschool Show Headed to CBeebies Channels

MANCHESTER: Impossible Kids, the children’s TV arm of Impossible Pictures, has started production on the new preschool series Buzz & Tell for CBeebies in the U.K. and BBC Worldwide’s international CBeebies channels.

The 52×5-minute series is a quiz show that features a walrus named Walter Flipstick as the host. The contestants include a mouse called Charles Cheese and an orangutan called Orange Bernard. The contestants try desperately to come up with the correct answers to the questions, but the at-home viewers are encouraged to participate in helping them find the right answer. BBC Worldwide has the global distribution rights to the show, which will launch on CBeebies later this year.

The series is Impossible Kids’ first production from its new development slate. Vision+Media supported Firestep to aid the company development of Buzz & Tell, through its Regional Attraction Fund (RAF), delivered in partnership with the Northwest Development Agency.

“We wanted to create a very funny and active show for preschool viewers and realized that the quiz-show format with its inherent audience participation would be perfect for the targeted age range,” said the show’s creator and co-founder of Impossible Kids, Jon Doyle. “We’ve created ten wonderfully silly puppet characters and a quiz-show host who will be filmed in a computer generated studio with all the lights, music and buzzes you’d associate with quiz shows through the years. The accent is on fun and giving children the chance to shout out the right answers.”

Added Doyle: “With the extraordinary technology of movies like Avatar at our disposal it seemed ridiculous not to implement it here. Amazingly our glove puppets actually look and move like real glove puppets!”

Jonathan Drake, the managing director of Impossible Pictures, commented: “We have an amazingly talented and respected team at Impossible Kids and, having made significant investment in development over the last year, we are now in the market place with some astonishingly good projects for kids of all ages. I’m delighted that we can unleash Buzz & Tell on audiences across the world as our first Impossible Kids production”.