Q Pootle 5

This charming preschool series took its starting point from a couple of books written by Nick Butterworth featuring the friendly green alien hero, Q Pootle 5. Nick was deeply involved in developing the series, which has been produced by his son, Ben Butterworth.

Together with the animation team at BlueZoo, they have created a really beautiful world on the planet Okidoki and the stories are often genuinely funny and touching with great voice performances from Ed Gaughan, Richard Ridings (Daddy Pig from Peppa Pig), Steven Kynman (Postman Pat) and Joanna Page (from Gavin and Stacey).

Musically, we were keen to keep things feeling organic so, although there are Theremins and a few bleepy noises, most of the instruments are much more earthy. In fact we went with a bit of an American country feel for much of the score so there’s a lot of banjo, ukulele and slide guitars in there, combined with quite big orchestral moments when things get a bit heavier into the action. As well as playing lots of the instruments myself, I called on the talents of the superb Andy Mellon (of the band Bellowhead) to add his trumpet into the mix.

Ben wrote a nice blog about the music for the series on the BBC website.

I’ll upload more tracks from this show very soon.

AWARDS