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The CBBC TV version of Horrible Histories has won yet another award. Now the kids’ show, which has become cult daytime viewing, is moving to a primetime slot The feedback from the BBC was unambiguous: “We really like it, but we feel the poo quotient needs to be higher.” Terry Deary , creator of the wildly successful Horrible Histories children’s publishing franchise, is recalling the two-year journey to bring his books to the screen. “At one time, it was going to be based on a ghost train at a deserted fairground carrying two children into the past. But the BBC, to its credit, was very adventurous and said that it wanted a comedy sketch-based format written by adult sketch-show writers.” It was the right call. Since Horrible Histories first aired in 2009 on CBBC , the BBC’s digital channel aimed at six- to 12-years-olds, it has been a huge hit with viewers and has won a slew of awards, including a Royal Television Society award for best children’s programme earlier this week . But it isn’t just children who have found themselves drawn to the show’s Pythonesque sketches, which skip jauntily through the books’ trademark themes such as the Rotten Romans and Groovy Greeks up to the Terrible Tudors and Vile Victorians. By the time the second series aired last summer, the programme had attracted a loyal audience of grown-ups, too; parents watching with their children at first, but soon followed by students and pensioners as it quickly developed into cult daytime viewing. Some of the most popular sketches and songs from the show have attracted more than half a million hits each on YouTube. But perhaps the show’s break-out moment came in January when it won best sketch at the Comedy Awards, the first children’s programme ever to do so. The crossover into a mainstream audience will be completed later this year when BBC1 airs a repackaged version of the show in primetime, fronted by Stephen Fry instead of the current host, a talking rat called Rattus Rattus . There are even ongoing discussions to create a stage show featuring all the actors, which would tour arenas in the autumn. And there are murmurs of a movie. “Children’s TV is, on the whole, appalling. Just shocking,” says Deary, whose books have sold 20m copies globally since the first one was published in 1993. “It’s all shouty, patronising voices. But what I love about the Horrible Histories show is that it’s not a literal translation of the books. I’ve written the odd song for the show and I make the odd cameo appearance, but I’m not a sketch writer. It’s best left to the likes of the excellent Steve Punt. Incorrectly, I get lots of credit for the TV show, but it’s the team behind it who are the massive talent.” Once the decision was taken by the BBC to use writers and actors from adult comedy shows, production company Lion Television corralled the best talent it could find. Writers such as Punt, Jon Holmes (Dead Ringers) and Giles Pilbrow (Have I Got News For You) wrote sketches for the first series, which featured comedy actors such as Meera Syal, Jim Howick (Peep Show), Simon Farnaby (The Mighty Boosh), Mathew Baynton (Gavin and Stacey) and Ben Ward (Dead Ringers). Dominic Brigstocke, the director of Green Wing and The Armstrong & Miller Show, also played a key role from the start. But by the second series, David Baddiel, Alexei Sayle and Dave Lamb (Come Dine With Me) were also making appearances. With the editing team behind The Office, Extras, and Outnumbered overseeing post-production, the show quickly stood out by some distance from its rivals on children’s TV. “The team is excellent,” says Deary. “The show’s actors were all targeted. They didn’t rely on auditioning unknowns. Yes, there is some ad-libbing at times, but it is rare because the actors are also involved in the writing. We sit around a table for about eight weeks with the director and a historical adviser and we read the books in a circle. Then someone might say, ‘That might work as a gameshow’ and they go off and write the sketch.” As a result, viewers have been treated to an Eminem-inspired pastiche about Charles II , a Victorian Dragons’ Den, “Spartan School Musical” and a Jackson 5-style explainer on hieroglyphics . The show’s unique comedy pedigree among children’s programming has long been acknowledged by those in the business. Jesse Armstrong, co-writer of the Bafta-winning Peep Show and Oscar-nominated In the Loop, admits the show has been his afternoon vice ever since it first aired. “Hit shows are very difficult to achieve. You need to have everything just right – that’s what’s so terrifying. But Horrible Histories has a great cast and brilliant writers. They’re also blessed with great source material. The tone is perfect and it is done in a non-patronising, engaging way. The key for me, though, is that the team has been given leeway to do the subjects that really interest kids – death, shit, blood and piss.” Armstrong says that it ranks alongside Pingu as his favourite children’s show: “You can just tell the creators of both shows have put more of themselves into them than is normal. I used to write for children’s TV [Tracy Beaker]; it’s certainly not easier than writing for adults. You have fewer tools at your disposal because you can’t draw on sexual content or obscenities. Kids are as discerning as adults, if anything they are quicker and clearer in knowing what they like. My daughter, who says Horrible Histories is her favourite programme, gets that the tone is sophisticated and that it takes children seriously. It doesn’t talk down to them. Just watch the Four Georges . It’s my favourite sketch – wonderfully written and beautifully performed. The programme could go on for years because the material is limitless.” The Four Georges sketch featured in the first series but is still among the most popular of the show’s trademark pastiche songs. Mocking the modern-day trend of boy bands perched on high stools sitting in a line, we see the four Georgian kings singing Born to Rule Over You under moody spotlights – “You had to do what we told you to do, just because our blood was blue” – before standing up in unison on the key change. Another much-loved repeat sketch is Stupid Deaths, which sees a comical grim reaper processing recently departed historical characters at the “Death Check-In” counter and then laughing mercilessly at the farcical manner in which they died. For example, King Edmund II, who was stabbed by a Viking hiding in his pit latrine, receives little sympathy from the reaper. No one seems to question that the show is entertaining, but is it good history? Dan Snow, the TV historian, says it doesn’t need to be both and we should celebrate it for what it is: “It’s wonderfully exciting to watch. It has such a great sense of the past. It’s fun, harmless stuff. But it isn’t a serious look at the past. It’s one step above Blackadder, but that’s fine: the Victorians fictionalised their history. We shouldn’t try to dress it up as brilliant history. For example, the Four Georges song is great, but George III was only mentally ill for a short period of his reign. It plays to stereotypes, but it’s fantastic as entry-level history.” While admitting he has not yet seen the programme, Tristram Hunt, the historian and Labour MP, expressed concerns in December about Horrible Histories being adapted for primetime BBC1, describing it as “cartoon content for adults”. “For children, Horrible Histories is an exciting aid to engage with the guts and gore of the past, but there are more sophisticated, populist ways of getting people involved in history than this.” Richard Bradley, the programme’s executive producer and managing director of Lion TV, rejects this perception: “Lion has done countless history programmes, but Horrible Histories is the best history we’ve ever done. It looks at the role of women, social history, attitudes to authority and class. We’ve done the foundation of the Anglican church and the American civil war. It’s incredibly dense and factual. My eight-year-old said to me after watching one sketch: ‘So, that’s what the Restoration was.’” Bradley says that his son must take some credit for the show ever being produced. “I had a chat with him about five years ago and he said he wanted me to make Horrible Histories for TV. But how could I get the rights? Even though the publisher Scholastic held the licence, the first thing was to get Deary on board. He had had a terrible experience with a little-known animated version of his books being produced about 10 years ago in the US. But he said there were three things that must happen if we were to do it: it must be horrible, funny and true.” Bradley says it took a while to find the “spirit of Blackadder, Monty Python and Carry On”, which he credits as the show’s key success. In addition to the time-travelling ghost-train format (“it was too similar to Doctor Who and Mr Benn”), Lion also tried to develop a Dumbledore-like master storyteller as narrator – “a sort of wizard historian” – but it felt too generic. “The click came when I met Dominic Brigstocke in the street one day and we immediately thought of doing a high-powered sketch show,” says Bradley. “We realised that when children go around stately homes all they ever want to know about is how the people went to the loo and how they died. Working with Anne Gilchrist, the then controller of CBBC, we finally struck on the live-action comedy route directed and acted by adult comedy talent.” Bradley says the programme has led the trend for adult comedy writers and directors working in kids TV. For example, Graham Norton’s company makes Sorry, I’ve Got No Head. But the most rewarding aspect of making the programme, he adds, was first showing it to children. “We took it to local schools and showed them the rough cuts. The reaction was fantastic. The recognition of the Horrible Histories brand is so strong that they even cheered the names Groovy Greeks and Rotten Romans.” There were a few sketches that missed the beat, admits Bradley – a riff on the Incas, for example. “But it made us realise that it had to be written 100% for children and not have knowing references aimed only at adults. We’re still learning what works best for children. At the moment, we have never gone further than the Blitz, but we are having discussions now about doing a sketch based during the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The Georgians with their big hair and makeup are very popular, but, from a pure comedy point of view, you really can’t beat the Romans.” Rewriting the past: What makes Horrible Histories so funny? Steve Punt At the first writers’ meeting we sat round with the producer watching clips of Blackadder and Life of Brian. The point, from the outset, was to stress that this was a comedy show based on history, not a history show with a bit of humour grafted on. It’s a fact of comedy writing that the tighter the brief, the better the result. Plucking comedy out of the air is what leads to cliches and well-worn themes. But knowing that you have to stick to the facts of what the Celts wore, or how the Tudors treated illness, concentrates the mind. It leads you into strange areas that you would never have thought of, and that’s always creatively a good thing. One underestimated element of the show is the sheer fun of all the costumes, wigs, silly beards and hats. Wigs, in my book, are funny, and so are hats. TV budgets have shrunk since the days of Blackadder and Python. My children have lived in a world where TV comedy mostly consists of people sitting behind desks on panel shows. There is a glorious, back-to-the-70s daftness about Horrible Histories’ parade of togas, wimples, ruffs and tights that makes it appealing – to a wide audience. David Baddiel People tend to go on about Horrible Histories being “not just a kid’s show, but a proper comedy show” but actually I don’t see the dichotomy there. It’s partly to do with the fact that kids are more sophisticated, especially linguistically, then they used to be, so to do a show that is clever and funny and uses arcane references but can play to adults and children is more possible now. It’s very modern in style – single camera, throwaway delivery etc – and it uses history brilliantly: they had a sketch once about how Henry VIII only found out about Catherine Howard’s adultery from his jester, since everyone else was too frightened to tell him, which was both poignant and funny – and, of course, told me something I didn’t know about the Tudors. When they asked me to play Vincenzo Larfoff (the reader of Scary Stories, which regularly turn out not to be that scary) I was really pleased, and he seems to have been a hit – I get kids shouting “scaaarry story” at me. Children’s TV Television Children and teenagers History Leo Hickman guardian.co.uk