A black British family has been commissioned to create a children’s television show about a black British family for the Sky Kids channel, despite having no previous experience or training in TV production.
Cynthia and Anthony Deluola, of Ghanaian and Nigerian heritage, live in London and work in child safeguarding and as an airline pilot respectively. To their astonishment, they impressed Sky’s producers with books they had self-published and an animated cartoon that they had made in their spare time because their daughter Elise had been unable to find characters like herself in print or on screen when she was aged five.
Elise, now nine, had attended a school book day event during which children dressed up in costumes based on their favourite characters from stories. She wore a Ghanaian costume – only to feel out of place among her classmates dressed as fairytale princesses and wizards.
Cynthia Deluola told the Guardian: “At the time, there was not a lot of books that represented black children or diversity. Even the cartoons, there were not a lot. So we thought, ‘OK, she likes to wear traditional African outfits, she has plenty, she could wear an African dress’. She loved it. She got to the school playground and saw everyone else, with Rapunzel and other fairytale characters. She felt so self-conscious.
“Her teachers said, ‘You look amazing, what have you come as?’ ‘I’ve come as myself.’ She didn’t want to take off her coat. She wanted to go home and change because she felt everyone was looking at her. I was disheartened and felt I needed to be the change I wanted to see.”
The Deluolas responded by self-publishing four books and making a cartoon, each voicing the characters. They found animators in Ghana.
Undaunted by the challenges of landing a TV commission, they sent it off to Sky, which was impressed by how much they had achieved.
The broadcaster got them working alongside Wildseed Studios, an award-winning British company that develops new creative talent. They collaborated on a show that responded to the Deluolas’ wish to portray a black family as aspirational, educated and successful, in contrast to the stereotypes so often represented on screen. The characters are based on their family, including Elise and her two brothers, each of whom has English and Ghanian names: Elise (Ama), Aaron (Ayo) and Jadon (Ade).
Theirs is a house filled with books and laughter, as reflected in Ama’s Story, a production for three- to six-year-olds, that will be screened on 24 February by Sky Kids in the run-up to World Book Day. It features live actors and animation.
Lucy Murphy, Sky’s director of children’s programmes, said the Deluolas’ submission stood out from hundreds that she receives every year: “It’s hugely important to us at Sky that kids feel represented. We live in the UK. It’s a very diverse population. What’s different about this is that it came through the story of a real family. It’s about a little girl who’s going to school book day, and is supposed to take her favourite book and just can’t decide on her favourite.
“Her family help her to realise that she can use her imagination to create her own book. It is full of her favourite things, which include the traditional kente cloth jacket that reminds her of Ghana. It’s about the importance of wanting to be yourself.”
Jesse Cleverly, the creative director and co-founder of Wildseed, said: “The Deluolas took a sadly common experience for black families of not seeing themselves or their cultural background represented in publishing or television and turned it into something extraordinary. I have nothing but admiration and pride that we got to work with them, and helped them fashion what they’d already done into something hopefully millions of other families will see and take courage from.”
The family were involved with every aspect of the production, from writing to costumes.
Anthony Deluola described the experience as “a dream come true”, adding: “The kids can see something that they can relate to. The food that’s being cooked, the way the family looks, especially from a London perspective. There’s nothing that’s relatable in terms of ‘that’s where I live, that’s how I talk, that’s how I look’. Doing the cartoon and shopping it around wasn’t easy, but my wife dared to dream.”
