The challenge was how to make it both factual and entertaining.
determine the plot. So, for example, when the Octopod’s batteries run flat, the crew enlists the help of some friendly electric torpedo rays, to jolt it back to life.
On their adventures (think Star Trek meets Thunderbirds underwater, with an ursine Jacques Cousteau at the helm), they befriend a diverse cast of oceanic characters. They meet the snapping shrimp, with its unfeasibly loud claw clap; the combtooth blenny, a fish quite literally out of water; and the extraordinary immortal jellyfish, which in times of threat can revert back to its infant state and begin its life all over again. Early introductions Watching BBC One’s Blue Planet II together last autumn really drove home to me quite how much my son had absorbed from the Octonauts. He identified a manta ray as soon as it drifted onto the screen. When spinner dolphins were shown, he explained to us how they use their different splashes as a form of communication.
It began to dawn on me that these Octonauts were doing far more for my son than giving him 10 minutes of fun while drinking his bedtime milk. I had initially thought that ‘Octonauts’ was just a game we played in the bath, but to him they were bringing the world’s oceans and rivers into his orbit, and gently feeding his imagination, at the same time as teaching him about life beneath the waves.
Now when we head down to visit Granny and Grandad on the coast of North Devon, we
go with an explorer in tow, who can’t wait to see what the rockpools might deliver. Last summer, when the beaches were littered with thousands of jellyfish, instead of cowering away, he exclaimed that this must be a jellyfish bloom. For him to appreciate such a concept, at the age of three, was staggering proof of the success of the programme’s creators.
Out of this world
Octonauts first came to life in a series of books written by Meomi, the Canadian creative studio of Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy. Their books were discovered by New York-based TV executive Kurt Mueller, who began to recruit a global team to bring the fantastic underwater world of these intrepid animals to the small screen. The challenge was how to make it both factual and entertaining.
The ‘eureka’ moment came during a visit by series writer Stephanie Simpson to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. Children were lining up for their encounter with manta rays at the aquarium’s touch tank. The little girl in front of her turned to her mother and asked “Mommy, what planet is that from?” At this moment, Simpson suddenly realised that it might be possible to teach children about the creatures in our ocean through a science-fiction format.
Once the format was established, the team set to work discovering which incredible marine species would make for a good narrative. “We do a lot of research before we start writing a story,” says Adam Idelson, who is both a writer and producer on Octonauts.
What makes the cartoon so clever is the way in which the learning is done surreptitiously – a young viewer has no idea that he or she is learning anything. “The formula of the show is that you will meet a strange creature who you might think is an
alien,” Adam explains. “But once you learn more about it, once you encounter it and maybe get a little scared by it, you realise that, no, this is a real creature. And we’re going to teach you a few things about it by the end of the episode.”
As I watch these shows over and over with my son, the same question keeps returning: “Are they real, Daddy?” At first, I hadn’t twigged that all of these animals were indeed genuine inhabitants of our planet. One episode features a siphonophore, for example – a bizarre collective of organisms joined together to make a single long colony that, in the show, resembles a string of coloured fairy lights, floating through the ocean. This was a new one on me.
So, I said to my son: “Let’s look it up.” Soon we found exactly what the real thing looked like. Children being sponges, when one appeared on Blue Planet II, my son shouted “Siphonophore!” well before David Attenborough had a chance to introduce it.
As Adam tells me, this was always the aim. “Very early on, we had anecdotal evidence that that’s exactly what parents and kids were doing,” he says. “They were asking ‘is this real?’ and then they were going online and checking it out. And that was very much always our hope and our plan – that they would get interested in marine science via the show. But our job is not to teach them everything about the ocean, because that’s not even possible. Our job is to teach them a little bit and get them interested.”
Making waves
It doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary but when I compare Octonauts to the cartoons I watched growing up in the 1980s, it’s like night and day. Not only is it a ripping wheeze, but it has my son enthralled by the natural world. When he spots litter, he knows that it can end up in the ocean and the sea creatures that live there might think it’s food. “We don’t want to make the animals poorly, do we
Daddy?” he says, sternly. “We should put our rubbish in the bin.” And that’s just from watching the cartoon.
The impact Octonauts has had on my son’s development is huge. The learning occurs seemingly by osmosis. Adam explains: “We like to deliver a fact in the middle of an adventure. Often, you’ll be learning a fact about a great white shark while one of our main characters is being chased by one. And we find that actually kids remember the facts better when we do it that way, as opposed to a character looking at the camera and lecturing.”
Fishing for ideas
Adam’s own children inspired some of the stories. “My favourite episodes are the ones that they actually helped me to write,” he enthuses. “My son, who was probably about 10 or 11 at the time, kind of understood what I was doing. He said to me, ‘hey, you should do an episode about what we learned today about sperm whales. They have to learn to dive really deep to get their food.’ And I replied, ‘well, that could be interesting. What if there was a sperm whale who was afraid to dive really deep in the ocean?’”
This conversation led to a script Adam then wrote about a sperm whale named Simon, which is his son’s name. In turn,