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.
“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…
Jocelyn calls her former boss and mentor Henson, who died unexpectedly of pneumonia in 1990 at the age of 53, ‘a creative mentor’ and ‘a genius’. “He was my mate,” she added. “He was supportive and he was funny.
“He’d watch something that we just made and he’d be staring at the screen and then he’d go: ‘That’s so goofy it’s worthy of us’. He was magic. I remember having a discussion with him about some idea I had and he just said to me: ‘Why are you trying to go to the Moon? If you shoot for Jupiter then you’ll get on the Moon’.
“It’s just that kind of creative leadership he had. He was also really good at putting people together who didn’t have any idea why they were together, and then suddenly you’d start working together and go ohhhh… He was the most extraordinary person and also he was a person who was the CEO of the company but he was a creative and that was huge.
“One time out of frustration I said to him: ‘Why do you never tell us we’ve done a good job?’,” Jocelyn added. “He said: ‘Why do I need to do that? Of course you’re doing a good job otherwise you wouldn’t be here’.”
The hit musical fantasy comedy series Fraggle Rock featured interconnected societies of Muppet creatures, most notably the Fraggles themselves. “Jim, being Jim Henson, had said: ‘I think we need to design a show that’ll help stop war’ to the small team of us who were developing it,” Jocelyn smiled.
“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.
“Sesame Street was very American, set on a New York street, while 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). It was different in every country and then the middle bit which was the bulk of the show would be puppets, which would be easy to dub.”
The incredible popularity of many of the kids’ TV shows Jocelyn worked on means people still come up to her saying: “You were my childhood”. One such iconic series was The Magic School Bus, an animated series which sees an eccentric teacher take her class on incredible educational field trips.
“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!’
“We had no idea how big it was at the time and it’s so exciting. It’s that kind of influence you realise that this kind of work can have.”
“There’s no magic formula for creating a successful kids’ TV show,” Jocelyn explained. “Executives think there is and that can sometimes be based on previous success.
“What do kids need? That’s the question that I always ask. What is this program trying to say to kids? Is it just trying to sell toys?
“I really understand we have to make money in order to make our shows but Jim Henson used to say: ‘If you do good work the money will come’. When I worked on Sesame Street back in 1973, that’s when it was quite new and they were still trying to figure out if TV could actually educate children.
“Everything was researched – what is it that kids need? It’s all that thinking I like to see behind something. Is it authentic? Is it not derivative, is it something different? That’s hard.”
And when it comes to watching children’s television today, Jocelyn has one key rule. “I don’t trust myself to judge a TV show for kids on my own,” she said. “My granddaughter, who is now about 10, used to live down the road from us and I would watch TV with her and it made all the 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.”
“I started reading to my kids when they were three months old,” said Jocelyn. “They’ve grown up and are readers and their kids are readers. I just think it’s really important.”
The writer penned Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock books as well as annuals for The Muppet Show. In 1988 she wrote a book called O Diddy, written by an imaginary friend whose human had stopped seeing him and her second original book is The Waterubas.
Made up of 99 per cent water and 1 per cent Ruba, each Wateruba has its own special colour and sings in its own special tone. There are 81 Waterubas, who can be hard to spot because they never stop moving and came to Earth together on an asteroid four billion years ago.
Iriam is the book’s main character and has the ability to “puddle-jump”, meaning she can travel at speed as water to a Wateruba anywhere on the planet. As the 11-year-old schoolgirl transitions from a puddle to a cloud and from a raindrop to an ice-cube, she learns fears are carried in the stories we tell ourselves – and that crucially, we can rewrite them.
The Waterubas: Book 1 by Jocelyn Stevenson is published by Mystery School Press and is available on Amazon
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