The 'edutainment' show that makes history appealing to children returns for a third series on CBBC
Horrible Histories, the Monty Python-style take on the most amusing, weird and disgusting facts from history, returns for a third series to CBBC next week, where it will run every weekday, over the school half-term.
What has arguably become the digital channel's most popular and celebrated show after Tracy Beaker has also gained its own brand extension, a new Gory Games show.
This features children competing in nasty challenges, extracting fake brains, heart and liver from an Egyptian mummy or shifting loads of brown "poo" ? cornflower and water with brown colouring ? in medieval pails.
Gory Games is hosted by Come Dine with Me's sardonic voiceover man Dave Lamb, assisted by the Horrible Histories puppet, Rattus Rattus.
Last year's second series broke new ground by winning best sketch show at the 2010 British Comedy Awards ? the first children's programme to be recognised at the ceremony.
It's been described as having more laughs than most post-watershed comedies, and a superior form of "edutainment" ? soft learning when school is out. In the new series we learn for instance that the "Vicious Vikings" introduced "berserk", "anger" and "rotten" to the English language. At a recent screening children asked the producers, why is history in school so boring?
One reason for the show's success is that the cast and writers include some of UK TV's finest comedy performers, such as actors Mathew Baynton (Gavin & Stacey), Martha Howe-Douglas and Laurence Rickard (The Armstrong & Miller Show) and David Baddiel. Writers include Steve Punt, Jon Holmes (Dead Ringers) and Giles Pilbrow (Have I Got News for You).
The second series last summer was watched by 34% of six- to 12-year-olds, 1.6 million children, but its appeal is wider than that. Damian Kavanagh, head of CBBC, said he was "absolutely delighted with the ratings and awards".
The new series is also supported with games, online extra content, a quiz and karaoke on CBBC Extra via the red button and a free Horrible Histories Prom.
The television adaptation is based on the series of popular children's books, licensed from publisher Scholastic UK, written by former actor Terry Deary, which started in 1993 with The Terrible Tudors and appears in the new series as the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian monk and historian. It had a special appeal to boys, as does ITV's Horrid Henry, getting them reading.
However, the genius of the CBBC TV version, co-produced by independent producers Lion TV and Citrus Television, is its speed and variety, the ability to jump between six or seven different historical eras on each show, with several sketches about each of them.
It also has adapted over the three series with music, dance and practical jokes. This third series contains plenty of trademark musical numbers, topped by the most ambitious song yet, as kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror onwards reveal how to remember them.
But it also increasingly sends up popular television formats, with this series including bizarre Aztec food in a Historical MasterChef featuring frogspawn jelly with tadpoles, crickets which jump out of the pan, and howler monkeys. Wife Swap, Fashion Fix, Gardeners' World, Dragons' Den and Come Dine with Me are also sent up.
In a sequence on the Romans, a Steve Jobs style visionary introduces his new invention, A Book, which unlike a scroll, has pages with writing on both sides.
However, producer Caroline Norris admitted to one shortcoming ? it is "hard to find women's stories", though Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria feature prominently. "We've done the suffragette story specifically, but most of history is written by men about men," Norris said.
Not every historical situation can be sent up. Norris pointed to the first world war trenches sketch in the Christmas special last year, which featured the 1914 Christmas Day football match, when British and German soldiers took part in an informal truce. "It felt really emotional, we didn't end it on a joke," Norris said.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2011/may/25/horrible-histories-comedy
Kevin Campbell Chelsea United States Alexander McCall Smith Kazakhmys Office for National Statistics
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