Story Shed

Story Shed gives children a story and then a conversation about it, and the second part matters as much as the first. Jake tells the tales. Ida, introduced as his little helper, joins at the end to talk each one through. Episodes open with a burst of hellos and an alliterative roll call of who is welcome, which might take in kite flyers and kangaroos on one occasion and granddads, geese and griffins on another. The silliness is deliberate, and it sets a warm, bouncy tone that carries through the whole episode. The stories cover a lot of ground. In Frankie Fish and Her One Wish, a fish named Frankie and her grumpy companion Pete are spun up a water spout, dropped onto hot sand and carried back to sea, and Pete, still shaken, admits it was maybe a little bit wonderful. The Day the Cows Stopped Mooing runs across two episodes: Ali and Amira meet a frightened creature whose trumpet takes sounds away, and the fix turns out to be a sound given freely, the squelch of a muddy puddle. Some stories are written in rhyme. In The Remarkable Toys of Ariella Boyd, a girl with very particular parents seats her teddy bears at the supper table, and instead of sending her upstairs they rediscover a long-forgotten sense of play. The Greatest Ice Cream in the History of the World Ever ends with a towering creation knocked to the floor by Pickle and Uncle Nish telling Suki and Cam to grab spoons and share what is left. Characters come back. Suki and Cam return from The Greatest Sandwich in the History of the World Ever, and Grandad Beard has appeared in more than one story; Jake suggests hearing the earlier ones before Grandad Beard and the Big Bag Man, which he flags as longer than usual. That story has a sharper edge, with Olive convinced that a Mr. Seketo is a fraud, then catching him handing a map to a man who has lived in town his whole life and asking for a one-pound donation. Olive also sees something new in Grandad Beard: sadness, at the thought that the town no longer needs him. The closing chats do more than recap. Jake asks Ida how a problem was solved, checks whether a planet's name was remembered or looked up, and slips in side questions such as which sound Ida likes best. A family could easily carry that kind of back-and-forth on once the episode is over. Each episode signs off with Jake greeting people who have been in touch and apologising to anyone he has missed. For a first listen, the two parts of The Day the Cows Stopped Mooing hold a complete adventure, with a chat with Ida after each half.