Lazy does it

About this programme by Peter Day

Imagine starting a global television show in a tiny place at least a thousand kilometres from any of the world's big media hubs, far away from the directors, writers, set builders, music and makeup people that TV needs at the snap of the fingers.

Imagine having to build your own studios for this little show from scratch, in much the same the way that the US networks colonise a regular theatre for their evening talk shows, or build a whole new complex, as NBC has just done in Universal City, LA, for its new Tonight programme host Conan O'Brien.

But this isn't Hollywood.

Now you may not ever have heard of Sportacus, but to your children he's a sort of Conan O'Brien or more. The faraway place he comes from is the LazyTown studios in Reykjavik, Iceland.

As your children will know, it is anything but lazy. Nor is the inventor, writer CEO and performer Marcus Scheving as I found out on my visit to LazyTown the other month. I got a whirlwind tour of the whole property, with little pause for breath in the two hours I was there.

Even in the depths of Iceland's semi suicidal economic destruction, Marcus Scheving has the panache to impress a casual visitor.

In fact, let's rethink that sentence. It's the reckless bravura of the Icelandic fishing people (a few are women) that lies behind the troubles they have got themselves into, and perhaps it's the way out of them too.

Exercise

Marcus Scheving is an international athlete and a health freak; he's taken his proselytising zeal into a global dimension, and built a little TV empire out of a mad idea.

On the screen (and in the studio), LazyTown is a world of its own slightly twisted logic, but the name is a paradox, of course.

The plot line in a LazyTown show is simple: Lazytown children are active and inspired by Sportacus, alias the endlessly athletic Mr Scheving; in his superhero outfit and discomforting pencil thin moustaches, he hovers just about the town in a minimalist spaceship, constantly zooming down on missions to encourage physical exercise in the town.

His sworn enemy is Robbie Rotten, a rather splendidly menacing teddy boy who is trying to keep LazyTown lazy.

It sounds relentlessly didactic, but in fact the energy of the show emphasised by the clever use of huge digital "green screen" background animated trick photography gives it a manic charm.. and makes it compelling viewing for children in 100 countries round the worlds.

As I said, everything is LazyTown has its own entrepreneurial logic: for example, the sets are packed with cartoonish (real) bendy furniture with not a straight line in sight because it's a style that Marcus Scheving is convinced will not date, so that LazyTown can lengthen its screenlife.

And then, of course, there are the spin-offs, a huge range of merchandise licensed to toymakers and others all over the world.

Mr Scheving/Sportacus even produced LazyTown currency so that parents could reward their children for real life non lazy activities such as brushing their teeth; but the Icelandic central bank complained the that LazyTown currency too closely resembled their Kroner, which is slightly ironic in the context of recent Icelandic developments.

Roadside

But why am I banging on about a fantasy town in a remote little Iceland nation with its economic reputation in tatters?

It is just that Marcus Scheving is a very striking example of how energetic entrepreneurship can accomplish the most remarkable things in unlikely places.

He's had the drive to create a TV studio in windblown Reykjavik industrial estate, amass the talent to keep the series coming out, and then get out and sell the bizarre creation al over the world, a world where children's TV is now under sharp cost reduction pressures, and sponsors for LazyTown have to be handpicked so the show's educational intentions are not undermined.

It reminded me of another remote place that has become famous just for being very remote indeed - the tiny town of Wall in South Dakota - not too far from the presidents' heads carved into Mount Rushmore.

The drugstore at Wall has been made famous by decades of rudimentary roadside advertising across the Midwest USA. (And occasionally far further afield. I've seen the place advertised on a lamppost in outside Amsterdam central station).

Wall Drug Store was taken over in the depth of economic recession in the early 1930s by the Hustead family who'd moved out from the city.

The little town, bypassed by the main road, was failing and so was the drug store, but Dorothy Hustead had a bright idea. One hot July morning in 1932 her husband and one of the boys went out to the main road (now the Interstate 90) and put up some signs that spelled out the message, one word to a board: "Free Iced Water Wall Drug Turn Next Corner", with an arrow.

In this dry and desolate area, the cars were turning off the main road and pulling into the Wall Drug even before the sign erectors got back. The traffic hasn't stopped to this day.

Great things come out of hard times, as Sportacus will tell you.