Driver Dan's Story Train

Did You Know?

• The Driver Dan website won the 2012 Prix jeunesse "up to 6 years" interactivity award, created by Plug In Media with animation by A Productions Ltd.
• The season two special episode won the 2013 Kidscreen award in New York, having been nominated in 2012 for the pre-school category.

Content

The cast of Driver Dan's Story Train is made up of soft plush toys, with a few exceptions. Milly and Lilly are paper cutouts shaped like flamingo-like birds. The Vrooms are two tiny egg-shaped vehicles, and the Counting Sheep are cube-shaped bricks painted to look like sheep. Every character or pair of characters, except for Driver Dan and Twinkle, owns a train carriage that can be attached to the Story Train. The audience is sometimes shown as a group of children, but more often is represented by the camera’s point of view and a child’s voice, and is occasionally asked for an opinion or to make a choice. At the start of each episode, real children sit on a pile of cushions. This scene fades away as a book opens to reveal a pop-up model of a train with an engine and two carriages: a steam locomotive, a stores car, and a flatbed loaded with storybooks. This is the Story Train. It quickly turns into a solid train and drives around, usually passing a character or group of characters without stopping, then later meets and interacts with them. The first time the Story Train meets a character it will interact with, only part of that character is shown, and the audience is asked to guess who it is. Those characters then climb into their carriages, and the train hitches on exactly three of those vehicles and tows them to Story Corner. At Story Corner, Twinkle flies ahead, lands on a giant book, and pulls a bookmark. The book opens to blank pages, and a pile of cushions tumbles out onto the floor. The Story Train stops, and the passengers get out to sit on the cushions or stand around. Driver Dan reads a story, usually from a book on the flatbed, and says, “Now show me the story.” The real children reappear and act out parts of the story, then vanish. The train then shrinks back to its original three vehicles, becomes a flat model, folds away, and disappears. The real children reappear and walk offstage. Each episode runs about ten minutes. Most characters speak in English or Arabic, but some only make a distinctive noise that other characters understand as speech.

Episodes

Series 1 has 52 episodes and a special. Series 2 has 50 episodes and a half-hour special; it started in Britain on BBC Two and on CBeebies at 5.30 pm Mondays to Fridays. Series 2 introduces Bippity, a stylized blue humanoid robot with his own carriage, and extra scenery representing a patch of dense jungle. The start sequence shows several story characters, not just one. Episode 1 of Series 2 is about the Story Train meeting Bippity. Fifteen episodes have been shown in Britain so far, including "A new friend," "The Great Hipini," and "Playing together." Each episode runs 11 minutes. The show was directed by Mark Taylor and produced by Teresa Reed.