A slight spanner in the works...

Yesterday, I visited the Great Northern Creative Festival at UCLan, and spoke with Jackie Edwards, executive producer for CBeebies. We discussed my idea for the "aliens" series, and although she did note that I understood her channel's ethos of "education with a small e" (i.e. educating children by stealth), and approved of my idea of delivering the messages via use of naive characters who act as a proxy for the audience, unfortunately she did note that my concept had already been done in a series called Floogals.

This was rather embarrassing, as I hadn't heard of this particular series. Having looked it up, it was surprisingly similar: three tiny aliens are given a mission to investigate a topic in a human home, which they explore, and report back to their home planet at the end.

This provided me with a key insight into my project, which is that I simply haven't done enough market research to fully understand what has already been done. I think the error I have made is, that I have concentrated on the programming on CBeebies as I believe that is the best "home" for my idea, and have mostly ignored other channels.

The way things are, I will have to go back to the drawing board, think of a new vehicle to deliver my educational content, and meanwhile do some further research.