The American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish became the latest celebrity to read a bedtime story for the BBC’s CBeebies channel on Friday. Eilish, who won her second Oscar last year with her song What Was I Made For? for Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster, Barbie, joins a rollcall of narrators so stellar that the question will soon not be who is on it, but who isn’t. She follows not only fellow singers such as Dolly Parton and Elton John, but the astronomer Brian Cox, the former Strictly Come Dancing professional Oti Mabuse, the makeover artist and TV cook Gok Wan, and any number of actors and comedians.
In publishing, the relationship between celebrity and storytelling for children too often appears to be a cynical exercise in brand extension. But the CBeebies bedtime stories are different. Many of the readers are attracted simply because they are parents themselves. Adult viewers reap the benefits too. No toddler will rush straight to bed at the sight of the actor Tom Hardy sitting on a garden bench beside his French bulldog, Blue, reading a story about the misadventures of a plastic bag – as many of their mothers professed to have done when CBeebies took to TikTok. Sold in overseas territories through the BBC’s commercial arms, the stories are also a moneyspinner for the cash-strapped corporation.
For the preschoolers who are the target audience, it is all about the strength of the storytelling. Hardy has become a Bedtime Stories favourite because of the energy he puts into bringing them to life. Proper attention has also been paid to the quality of the stories that are selected. Eilish, who has spoken out on the climate crisis, reads an eco-fable about the importance of letting nature do its own thing by the author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers, who has become a star in his own right in the last two decades of children’s publishing.
As any parent knows, holding the attention of tired small children is no small feat. These stories seem like a gift from a more innocent age. That is true of the CBeebies enterprise more generally, which – since its launch in 2002 – has shown how innovative and inclusive public broadcasting can be. Shows such as Anne Wood and Andrew Davenport’s Teletubbies, In the Night Garden and (by Davenport alone) Moon and Me, can appear surreal or mystifying to adults, but compelling to their children. They have put educational psychology to work to such effect that it has changed the face of early years broadcasting around the world.
With maths animations, craft workshops and games for long car journeys, CBeebies offers a soothing assurance to aspirational parents that in plonking their child in front of the television for a short while each day, they are not going to sprout a couch potato. The comedian Rob Delaney, who voices a character in the animated show Bitz & Bob, described the channel this week as “like the third parent in any family that raises children”.
He too has read a Bedtime Story. The genius of the strand is that it has brought the old‑fashioned family values of Watch with Mother into the age of viral celebrity and directed them towards a pleasure in books. Children and their carers can sit down together and share the experience, even if the flights of fantasy it takes them on are entirely different.
