As we speak with award-winning children’s television writer and producer Jocelyn Stevenson, the creator of The Muppets and Sesame Street, you’ll be familiar with her work.
The name Jocelyn Stevenson might not be instantly recognisable but the iconic children’s TV shows she helped to create are a different matter. From Pingu to Barney and Friends and The Magic School Bus to Sesame Street, the acclaimed writer and producer began her career Stateside, when she was employed by legendary puppeteer Jim Henson to write several Muppets-based children’s books.
Jocelyn went onto co-create Fraggle Rock for Henson and other UK TV shows she had a hand in include Funny Bones, Bob the Builder and Thomas & Friends. In 2015, the British-American received a BAFTA Special Award for her outstanding contribution to children’s media and back across the pond, she is an Emmy Award winner too.
Now, the talented writer, who was born in Chicago and lives in the UK, has authored her own pair of children’s books with the first, The Waterubas: Book 1, currently on sale. “I wanted a big idea and what could be bigger than water, which connects everything?” said Jocelyn, who turned to an old friend, Brian Froud, to bring her characters to life.
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“Waterubas aren’t creatures that live in the water, they are water – huge difference! Kids will go with you where grown ups never would.” To celebrate the book’s release, The Mirror sat down with the esteemed producer to chat all things Jim Henson and find out her view on children’s television today…
Jim Henson
Henson, a creative mentor and mentor to her, passed away unexpectedly from pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 53, according to Jocelyn. She continued, “He was my mate.” He was encouraging and funny, he said.
He would stare at the screen while he watched something we had just created, and he would say, “That’s so silly it’s deserving of us.” He had magic. I recall having a conversation with him about a thought that he had just made: “Why are you trying to go to the Moon?” You will land on the Moon if you aim for Jupiter.
“It was exactly that kind of creative leadership he had.” He also excelled at bringing people together who had no idea why they were together, and you would suddenly start working together and go ohh… He was the most extraordinary person, and he was also the CEO of the business, but he was also very creative.
Why don’t you always tell us we did a good job, I once told him out of frustration. ‘, “Jocelyn added”. Why do I need to do that, he asked? You’re doing a good job, of course, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.
Fraggle Rock
Interconnected societies of Muppet creatures, most notably the Fraggles themselves, were featured in the popular musical fantasy comedy Fraggle Rock. Joelyn smiled as Jim Henson said, “I think we need to design a show that’ll help stop war.”
“I mean who thinks like that? Geri Jewell who was working on it too, he’d been the head writer of The Muppet Show and an old colleague of Jim’s, he joked: ‘Do you want that by Thursday?’ But it informed everything. This whole idea of these three species who didn’t know anything about each other but they lived in the same world.
In Fraggle Rock, there would be that little bit at the beginning, which in the UK was Doc and Sprocket (the elderly inventor and his canine best friend), while Sesame Street was very American and set on a New York street. Every nation had its own unique differences, and puppets would make up the middle act, which would be easy to decode.
The Magic School Bus
People still remember Jocelyn’s saying, “You were my childhood, you were my childhood because of how popular many of the kids’ TV shows Jocelyn worked on.” An animated film called The Magic School Bus, in which a bizarre teacher takes her class on incredible educational field trips, is one of these iconic series.
“If the kids were learning about plants the school bus would shrink and they’d go inside a plant,” recalled the writer, who adapted the script from the book series by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen. “When we did the reboot for Netflix (in 2017), voiced by Lily Tomlin, we were getting in touch with scientists and they’d say: ‘Wait a minute – The Magic School Bus? I’m a scientist because of The Magic School Bus!’
It’s so exciting because we had no idea how big it was back then. You become aware of the impact that this type of work can have.
The ideal program
Joycel explained that there is no magic formula for making a successful kids’ TV show. Executives believe there is, and some of that can be based on previous success.
What is required by children? That’s the query I frequently get. What is the message being conveyed to children by this program? Is it merely attempting to sell toys?
Jim Henson once said, “If you do good work, the money will come.” I fully understand that we must make money to produce our shows. When I first started working on Sesame Street in 1973, Sesame Street was still in its early stages of development and was still attempting to determine whether television could actually educate children.
What is it that children need, according to the researcher? I like to see something hidden by all that thinking. It’s real, right? Is it unique, or is it not a derivative? That’s hard”.
And Jocelyn has a guiding principle when it comes to watching children’s television today. She said, “I don’t trust myself to independently evaluate a TV show for children.” “I used to watch TV with my granddaughter, who is now about 10 years old, and it made a big difference.
“It was with her that I first watched Peppa Pig and realised how good Peppa Pig was. I like programmes like Bluey that break expectations.”
The Waterubas
When my kids were three months old, Jocelyn said, “I started reading to them.” Both their children and their parents are readers now. Simply put, I believe it to be very significant.
The author wrote annuals for The Muppet Show and Sesame Street as well as books about Fraggle Rock and Fraggle Rock. Her second original book, The Waterubas, was published in 1988 under the title O Diddy, which was a fictional friend of hers who had stopped seeing him.
Each Wateruba has its own unique color and sings in its own unique voice, making up 98% of the water and 1% of the ruba. Because they never stop moving and formed on an asteroid together four billion years ago, 81 Waterubas are difficult to spot.
The main character in the book, Iriam, can “puddle-jump” and travel as quickly as water to a Wateruba anywhere on earth. The schoolgirl, age 11, discovers that fears are embodied in the stories we tell ourselves, and that crucially, we can rewrite them as she transitions from a puddle to a cloud and from a raindrop to an ice-cube.
