A Nottinghamshire woman is bringing happiness and escapism into the lives of 1.5 million children around the world. Former BBC producer Rehannah Mian launched a podcast called Magical Storybook: English Nanny Bedtime Stories just over two years ago, which has gone on to spark the interest of youngsters in 200 countries - from Thailand to Australia.
Kids love the stories and the sound of her voice, as one of the few children's storytellers in the world with an English accent. Children, aged three to eight, listen as Rehannah brings to life the long lost medieval fairytales and it's all for free.
Rehannah, who lives in Radcliffe-on-Trent, said: "I did lots of voluntary work with children and I realised most of them hadn't heard the old traditional fairytales that I grew up with but they'd seen the Disney films which are more sanitised versions of the fairytales.
"At village fairs and the scouts I started telling the original stories of fairytales, the medieval versions, where there were lots of morals attached to them. There weren't that many happy endings but you learnt a lot and the kids loved them.
"I was worried that they might be a bit graphic and they may be a bit scared but they absolutely loved them. I started a podcast. I thought I'd try just uploading an original fairytale and see what happens. I recorded Goldilocks and within half-an-hour I had ten downloads and one was from Australia."
As the podcast grew, Rehannah started retelling the traditional, non-copyrighted versions of stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. "They went down a storm. I got emails from all round the world saying their kids loved them, that it was starting conversations in the family about which version they preferred, this version or the modern version, and in just over a year I had a fanbase of just over a million in 200 countries," she said.
Two years on the number has rocketed to 1.5 million. As the online stories grew in popularity to be in the top three per cent of all podcasts globally, it caught the interest of the people behind Sesame Street, who have teamed up with meditation company Headspace, to create their own calming bedtime stories for youngsters struggling to sleep.
They're now paying Rehannah to have their Goodnight World stories, featuring popular Sesame Street characters, appear on her podcast. The first, Elmo to the Moon, introduced by Rehannah, went live this month.
"It's every girl's dream," said Rehannah, who used work as a producer on BBC television programmes including Countryfile, Secret Britain and Inside Out. "This thing I wanted to do from my heart is now earning me a living. The goal is to look for more sponsors now and that will enable me to keep recording more stories."
Off of the back of storytelling Rehannah has gone on to write her own tales aimed at a slightly older audience of seven to 12-year-olds. Her love of history led her to research medieval heroes.
She said: "I am half Pakistani - there are loads of characters from medieval history that were black and Asian and what you'd call the influencers of the day. These were predominant characters that had been written out around the 1500s, so I started bringing these characters back and researching them and writing children's stories about them.
The first, published online and in book form, is Mia and the Curse of Camelot, revolving around the adventures of a young mixed race girl, like herself, with Sir Morien, an African knight in the original tales of King Arthur. Rehannah said: "He was described as King Arthur's strongest knight so when I read about him I thought I'm going to do an adventure story with a mixed race kid who looks like me, because there's never any heroes that look like me or my niece.
"From that I was getting emails from all round the world saying their five-year-old was just loving it and they were pretending they were the characters and that they loved how they looked like them. I was getting emails from Saudi, from Australia, everywhere in the world. I turned it into a book and I'm getting sales in 200 countries and 300,000 downloads of the book.
"I was able to empower children around the world to say heroes do look like you and they always did and teach them a little bit about medieval history."
Book number two is underway. This time it's about a Saudi Arabian astronomer, who created a device for measuring the position of the moon and stars which is still used today. "Again she was written out of history but that's going to be the next book," said Rehannah.
"For me it's about allowing kids around the world regardless of wealth being able to listen to fairytales, learn English and it doesn't cost them anything and these global podcast hosts like Apple and Spotify have allowed me to do that which is just amazing.
"I have always been really in touch with my own childhood and I've always loved writing and reading old- fashioned stories. I have never grown out of that and it upset me a little bit when children weren't reading these stories any more.
"To hear all the mental health problems children are having and they're not reading. For me growing up, the way I got out of any problems and my pure escapism was all was all the books I had around me, all the Ladybird books, all my Storyteller books which were cassette audio tapes and read-along books.
"They made me totally escape from whatever else was going on in the world and I just felt really sad that children didn't have that escapism and I wanted to create it for them. Listen to the stories are magical-storybook.com/podcast.
I started a children's fairytale podcast just before lockdown as I wanted to give children across the world free stories to listen to.
Sesame Street heard about my story, saying that they love what I'm doing for children and asked to support me with sponsorship. So now I'm working with them.
My podcast, Magical Storybook: English Nanny Bedtime Stories is in the top 3% of all podcasts, globally, and has a fanbase of over a million children, globally.
I'd love to tell you more about how a Radcliffe girl became one of the biggest kids storytelling brands in the world.
