The Let's Go Club: "I'll never look at cutlery the same way again..."

The Let's Go Club is a brand new summer CBeebies programme with an exciting format. This innovative show is the first CBeebies programme that appears on a variety of platforms - television, radio and online. The Let's Go Club is made by the audience; it will feature video, pictures and audio recordings sent in from CBeebies viewers and their families. Simon Hall, Series Producer of The Let's Go Club gave us a quick look into what we can expect from the show. 

Hello, can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do on The Let’s Go Club?

I’m Simon, the Series Producer on The Let’s Go Club. It’s my job to make sure everything on the show runs as smoothly as possible, so that we make the best series we can with the time and budget that we have.

No two days are the same which is why I love my job. I could be doing anything; from sweeping the studio floor, writing scripts, to making sure that the children we film have an unforgettable, and risk-free experience. From beginning to end there’s a lot of head-scratching, problem-solving and re-thinking - and it’s a pleasure doing all of it.

I don’t make the series on my own - I have a brilliant team around me who bring all the skills and experience that’s needed to pull together the programmes, activities for the websites, social media and lots of other bits and pieces. They include the Design Assistant, the Studio Director, Production Manager, Director of Photography, Content Producers, Researchers to name a few. Bringing a team together and seeing them create something brand new from scratch is a fantastic thrill.

How did the show come about?

For a long time, CBeebies has wanted to make a series that children could easily feed into and be directly involved with. When I was 7 years old, I sent a drawing through the post to Take Hart, in the hope that it would one day be chosen to appear in The Gallery. In those days this was known as a 'send-in', and it was incredibly exciting that my picture might end up on television. Today, children can take video clips on a smartphone, upload them directly to YouTube and they’re viewable across the globe in an instant for anyone to see. We call this user-generated content, or UGC if we’re saving syllables.

User-generated content was key to the development of the programme and a lot of thought went into how it would be created, recorded, gathered, and then featured and reflected.

The inspiration for the development of The Let’s Go Club was always things we knew children loved, not just on TV or online, but in their everyday lives.

From the start, we wanted the series to reflect family's modern lives and exist on lots of different platforms – TV, online, radio, social media (for the grown-ups of course!) – and this helped to inform the ideas we had. We decided on short, stackable, standalone content that could work across platforms, and which children would enjoy collecting. These nuggets could be joined together to make the TV show, but work just as well as a clip on YouTube or sound-bites on CBeebies Radio. 

So we watched a lot of other TV programmes, spoke (and listened) to a lot of children, and had a lot of meetings. We made a pilot episode; a rough version of what we thought The Let’s Go Club should be. We always wanted children and families to be directly involved in the series – either in the club house during filming or at home making the things that appear in the show. Our thought was that this would be something the CBeebies audience really wanted and happily, we were proved right.

The CBeebies Grown-ups social media community on Facebook and Twitter helped us to make the pilot after we put up a shout-out on Grown-ups social media asking for families that liked to make stuff together to get in touch. Within hours of the call to action, we’d received scores of emails and hundreds of shares on Facebook and Twitter. The Let’s Go Club had definitely got going!

When we’d finished the pilot episode we then asked a whole host of people: children, families, other TV types to watch it; and got them to tell us what they did and didn’t like. Then we went back to the drawing board to tweak things. The result of all that is what you’ll see on television, online and radio – a club that never closes, The Let’s Go Club!

How is The Let’s Go Club different from other CBeebies shows? What can viewers expect from the show?

There’s one very special thing that makes The Let’s Go Club different from most other CBeebies programmes - the audience at home can interact directly with the show and create content that will appear on TV, online and on the radio!

Our summer series has thrown up some interesting challenges about how we make sure we’re showing as much as possible of the brilliant stuff that young viewers send in. We will be adding their pictures, photos, clips and messages to the show right up until transmission. This means we have to be very organised and trust that children and families will keep sending us things throughout the school holidays. But, we know people will rise to the challenge!

We also want the show to inspire children to explore the world around them. There’s so much out there to see, and a lot of it is right on the doorstep. Children lead some of the films we’ve made – they ask the questions, they get stuck in to the action and they get excited about what they’re doing.

Children are also at the heart of pretty much all the other parts of the show; whether it’s learning a new Super Skill, getting creative with our Table Top activities, or throwing some shapes in the Club Dance. 

Who are the presenters and how did you choose them?

The brief for our team was to find four exciting (and excitable) new presenters on The Let’s Go Club, who all come from very different backgrounds.

Joanna is a natural presenter who will throw herself into any project. She has experience as a voice-over artist and dancer. In her audition, Joanna got us body popping with a unique dance style called 'tutting'.

Londoner Abe has taught dance to all ages and travelled the world performing as a hip hop dancer, body popper and human beat boxer! His experience working with children shone through in his audition.

Kirsten is an energetic, arty Scouser (her words!) with an infectious sense of fun. In her spare time, Kirsten likes to experiment with food. She even demonstrated how to make fizzy lemonade in her audition!

Bristolian Craig has been working as a successful TV presenter for five years. He has a warm, friendly personality and, with an abundance of live television experience, Craig can think on his feet!

Kirsten and Joanna have never appeared in front of TV cameras before, but that doesn’t stop them from having bundles of infectious energy. Abe has done some acting, including a part in Casualty, but it’s his background in dance that impresses - and boy can he move. In fact, it’s a challenge to get him to stand still. Craig is already an established presenter and has taken his new co-presenters firmly under his wing. His wealth of experience has already started to rub off on the others. You can find out more about them on The Let's Go Club's website. 

Finding our on-screen team was a mammoth effort. The brief for the CBeebies development team was new faces, raw talent and real skills that could be shared with the audience. The search reached far and wide, with auditions in London, Leeds and Bristol. The final call-back day involved all sorts of tasks including delivering lines to camera, taking part in a head-to-head team challenge and doing a make in pairs. At the end of the day we knew that Joanna, Abe, Kirsten and Craig were the perfect fit for The Let’s Go Club.

We hear you’ve got some crafty CBeebies families helping with the series, what will they be doing?

The Let’s Go Club has been asking families across the UK to get creative and help us make the series. We’re planning on having Table Top activities in the show – anything from a make, to a bake, to a science experiment. But we don’t like activities that don’t DO anything, so we’ve challenged families from around the country to take our ideas further, and use them as inspiration to have lots more fun.

All the families that we’ve filmed for the series were found through the CBeebies Facebook and Twitter community, in response to shout-outs that were made online. Lots of the community applied and it’s great that some of them have been able to play a part in the show.

From Hull to Pontypridd, Ilford to County Down, we’ve travelled as far as possible in the search for craft-loving families!

What will parents, carers and little ones get from The Let’s Go Club?

We’ve been thinking of The Let’s Go Club as the summer club that never closes. All summer, when we’re not on TV you can always find something for everyone online, from little ones to grown-ups.

The Let’s Go Club is somewhere we hope all children would want to spend their summer holidays having fun, making new friends and discovering new things.

There’s something brand new from the club EVERY day, which should help take some of the strain off parents during the long school holiday.

And, for those out there who like a record of the things they’ve done and what they’ve achieved, we’ve created our Club Collectables – little rewards to give your family when you’ve done something that we’ve shown in the club house, or when you send something to us. Anyone can download them from the CBeebies website, print them out and start collecting. Plus, when you’ve got the lot, you can get your hands on the coveted Super Fan Collectable. I’m halfway there already!

What is your ‘Cool Move’ Simon?

I’d be lying if I said I’d mastered even one of Abe’s Cool Moves, despite the fact that he’s a naturally gifted dancer and teacher. But the truth is we did have an enormous amount of fun creating The Let’s Go Club. All of the game-playing, craft makes and dancing were thoroughly tested by the production team ahead of anything that was filmed.

That’s meant I’ve learnt a lot that I didn’t expect to and definitely didn’t know before we started. I can now hula hoop, make a coin disappear magically and skip double Dutch.

There are also things I’ve discovered I really can’t do. I am useless at dancing The Robot, terrible at spinning a plate on a stick and, under no circumstances, should I be allowed to attempt to play the spoons. I’ll never be able to look at cutlery in the same way again.