So, any idea what you’re buying the kids for Christmas, 2007? Or does the question seem so premature as to be ridiculous? Well, if you are the parent of a boy under 4, let me help you. The chances are that, come next year, you will have purchased at least one of the following: a DVD, toy, duvet cover, pyjamas or knife-and-fork set on the theme of Roary the Racing Car.
Never heard of Roary? Well, that’s because he won’t be on our television screens until next spring. But the prediction is that by Christmas 2007 he will be a multimillion-pound property and in the top three bestselling TV shows for pre-school kids. He could be the next Bob the Builder.
This may seem a rash prediction — but not, perhaps, when it comes from Keith Chapman, the man who created Bob, the yellow-helmeted phenomenon who has generated sales of just under £1 billion. Chapman is also the creator of Fifi and the Flowertots which, in less than a year, has become the No 1 show for pre-school girls in the UK, Australia and parts of Europe.
Like Bob, Fifi is broadcast in more than 100 countries. Chapman is the first person to create two of the top three best-selling licences for products based on characters: Bob is currently at No 2, Fifi at No 3 and Thomas the Tank Engine at No 1. Tanned, smiling and just back from a promotional trip to Denmark, Chapman (whose company, Chapman Entertainment, developed Roary) says: “I think Roary will be the biggest boys’ brand within a year and a half.”
His backers certainly seem to agree. Last week Roary was launched amid great fanfare at the New York Licensing Show. The animated programme, which is set at a race track and features the voices of the comedian Peter Kay and Sir Stirling Moss, secured broadcast commissions and global licensing deals even before it started full production.
As you would expect of a man who has made millions, he is dressed in expensive casual clothes. But he also seems uncynical, enthused, almost Tiggerish in his bounciness. He says how much he loves working for pre-school children: “That age group is so great, when they’re learning to talk and developing a sense of humour.”
Yet he is steeped in one of the most cynical of all professions, having worked for years in advertising, helping to build brands and sell products. But he says that this is what helps him to get inside other people’s — especially children’s — minds. “A creative team in an ad agency gets given all sorts of different briefs, like Brylcreem for teenagers or flats for OAPs. So they have to have that ability to jump into different mindsets. The children’s stuff also comes from me being a young boy drawing all the time, always believing I would come up with characters which would be famous.”
And the advertising background makes him a realist about the money-orientated business of children’s television. He admits that when he is thinking ideas through he is also calculating how they will translate into merchandise. The hard sell of toys, DVDs and lunchboxes to fill children’s stockings every Christmas is the bread and butter that funds the astronomical cost of making animation films. It cost £3.5 million to make the first episodes of Fifi at Cosgrove Hall, in Manchester.
“There’s no escape from it because you can’t actually fund the show without it,” he says. “I know how it sounds, but it’s the modern world. We are a young company and somehow we have to recoup this money. You can’t do it by selling it to TV stations alone. You have to think of it as a business: how is it going to translate in Mexico, for instance. Production companies will only take the very best ideas which will then translate globally. What we do is so expensive — stop frame at its very best.”
It was in the mid 1980s, when Keith Chapman was 26, married and what would then have been called a dinky (double income no kids yet) that he watched a JCB digger in the road near his house and saw something that appealed to the child in him. He sketched an image on a pad, then put it away in an envelope.
A few years later, when he had three young sons, he retrieved the envelope and began to invent bedtime stories for them based on the character. Whenever he asked which story they wanted they invariably shouted “Bob! Bob!” so he knew he had something. By the year 2000, millions of other kids were doing the same after Bob the Builder became a worldwide success.
Chapman got the idea for Fifi — half flower, half girl, a forget-me-not who forgets a lot — while sitting in his garden in South London. A quarter of all sales of pre-school toys are now Fifi products. Even he cannot believe how breathtakingly fast — far faster than Bob’s — her success has been. If the words Stingo, Bumble, Primrose, Poppy and Slugsy mean anything to you (the characters who inhabit Fifi’s organic garden world) then you are undoubtedly a parent. As the mother of a two-year-old with a full-on addiction to Fifi (it is shown daily on Channel 5 and Nick Junior) and the full repetoire of merchandise, I appreciate the economic might of children’s animation.
The idea for Roary, however, didn’t come originally from Chapman but from David Jenkins, who worked at a senior level at Brands Hatch circuits. Chapman is insistent that I mention this. “I know how it felt whenever I didn’t get the credit for Bob,” he says. “I’d had my own idea based on a car and a garage but this is stronger because it’s a racing car. It is mixing different types of racing cars together in a world.”
Chapman knows that Bob has been good to him. It has enabled him to put his sons — William, 17, Ben, 15 and Bertie, 12, through private school, to pay off his mortgage and to buy his parents a house. (His mother is confined to a wheelchair after picking up the MRSA bug during a hip operation.) He says the boys are thankful to Bob, but they have also been embarrassed by him — such as when the Bob the Builder theme tune was at the top of the pop charts and they would be on the school bus with every child singing along and they would “cringe down in the back seat thinking: ‘I hate my dad’.”
He came up with Fifi after parents complained that there was nothing on TV for very young girls. Lacking a daughter of his own he asked friends’ daughters to give him key words of things they would like to see in a TV show. “Pink” was near the top, as was gardening, fashion, cooking, music and jewellery. Chapman wanted Fifi to forget words a lot because that’s what pre-schoolers do. He wanted it to be “sometimes emotional, sometimes funny, very colourful, almost hypnotic”. There are also elements geared as much at parents as children — healthy eating, early nights, fresh air. If the parents don’t like it, says Chapman, then you’ve lost the battle.
If you want some psychology from Chapman then he readily explains that, to succeed, a character must “touch a child’s heart, bond with them emotionally so they can’t do without it”. Deliberately, he drew Bob with a big head and a small body because that’s how pre-schoolers look. Although he still receives handsome royalties, he sold the creative rights for Bob to Hit Entertainment to have the financial freedom to set up his own company. But you get the impression that he is rather wistful about that now.
It must be hard seeing the character you honed at your own children’s bedsides being changed by others, however subtly and however successfully. But Chapman is rapidly manouvering himself into a financial position where he won’t have to sell any of his babies ever again.
CASHING IN ON THE KIDS
Entertaining pre-school children has become big business in Britain as producers cash in on toddlers’ demands for familiarity — and the desire of parents to keep them happy.
Aping the model pioneered by Walt Disney in the US, British producers have created children’s characters and revived old favorites. They have also created highly rated companies and made millions of pounds for themselves.
Keith Chapman’s Bob the Builder was so succesful that it became the backbone of Hit Entertainment. The lion’s share of Bob’s revenues — around £100 million — comes from merchandising. At Bob’s peak, Hit was able to buy Thomas the Tank Engine’s company for £139 million, making Britt Allcroft, who had revived the franchise, £7 million. But Bob disappeared from TV, sales tumbled, and Hit was bought by a private equity firm for £489 million. Peter Orton, Hit’s founder, received £30 million. Chapman is estimated to have earned more than £5 million in royalties.
He’s not only one making money: Anne Wood, the creator of the Teletubbies, was earning £10 million a year at the show’s peak. The BBC, which owned some of the rights, picked up more than £128 million. Lord Alli, the Labour peer, paid £111 million to buy Noddy, and the company behind him Chorion. Publisher Richard Desmond made £6 million from selling rights to Rupert the Bear.
