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IN TOUCH

TX:Ìý 20.02.2024Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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Clip

So, we’re going to have a little touch tour of some of the characters in Mixmups.

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White

I’m in a small studio in Cheshire – Mackinnon and Saunders – which is the home of some of the most iconic animations in children’s TV and film – Fantastic Mr Fox; Bob the Builder; Postman Pat – puppets of these characters are all round this room and behind where I’m sitting.Ìý So, could the Mixmups be the next on the list?

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Clip – Mixmups

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The Mixmups are the creation of Rebecca Atkinson, who is also the executive producer of the show.

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Atkinson

So, first of all, we’re going to start with Pocket the Bear.Ìý I’m going to hand you Pocket the Bear.Ìý She’s about nine inches tall…

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White

Oh yeah.

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Atkinson

She’s a blue bear with curly fur.

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White

What’s this thing hanging down… oh it’s a… is that her white cane?

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Atkinson

She’s quite tough, so you don’t need to worry about her going over like that.

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White

I’ve just knocked her over.

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Atkinson

So, Pocket the Bear is partially sighted, she’s got tunnel vision, which is the same as me, so she has got glasses on, very wide glasses with tiny little stars on the corner.Ìý And then she’s carrying a white cane.Ìý So, my white cane’s got a pink handle, so this white cane has also got a pink handle.

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White

Right.Ìý So it shows up well?

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Atkinson

Yeah.Ìý And then she’s got tiny little pockets on her body, which you might be able to feel just here and here – there’s three of them.

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White

Yeah, I’ve got one.

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Atkinson

Basically, I designed this character because I felt that visually impaired people like to know where things are.Ìý So, she is a VI character who’s got pockets so she can keep all her things safely around her and know where things are.Ìý If you want to you can manipulate these joints, you can feel inside that there’s an armature, which is like a skeleton and it’s got ball and socket joints in it and that allows the animators to move the limbs just a fraction, take a photo, move it another fraction, take a photo and then when you put all those photos together, you’ve got the magic of animation and movement and they come to life.

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White

Right.

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Atkinson

And, obviously, anyone who uses a white cane knows about the kind of the click clack opening of the white cane, you know, when you drop it and it goes click, clack, clack…

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White

Do you mean [demonstrating] that?

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Atkinson

That’s it, we all know that sound very well.

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You’ve got in your hand a full sized… your white cane, I’m now going to pass you a miniature version of a folded white cane.Ìý It doesn’t unfold, so it’s a solid model.Ìý And part of the reason I wanted to put a white cane on is because there is a lot of stigma around using white canes and I know when I needed to start using one, I felt a lot of feelings about using a white cane.Ìý So, I just wanted to normalise it for children because I know that also, there are children who could benefit from using what is, essentially, a wonderful tool of mobility.

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White

Indeed, I’m very fond of my white cane.

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Atkinson

Yeah but people don’t…

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White

Can I hand this back to you?

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Atkinson

Yeah, sure.

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White

There you go.

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Atkinson

So, this is the next one, which is sort of slightly unfolded, so you can feel it click clacking out there in the next stage.Ìý So, if you take a photograph of each of these in Pocket’s hand then they animate it, put them altogether, and it appears to unfold just like a real one.

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Clip – Mixmups

I’m Pocket the Bear.Ìý I have a guide dog called Yapette, who helps me get around safely and not bump into things I might not see.Ìý Yapette has brown fur, a funny red clown nose.Ìý She wears a white and red spotty guide dog harness.Ìý Sometimes I use a white cane too.

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Atkinson

So, just like in my own life, as a VI person, I use a combination of a guide dog and a white cane and nothing.Ìý So, when this character’s at home, she doesn’t use a guide dog or a white cane because she’s in her home environment.Ìý But when they go out on adventures, she will either use the cane or the dog, depending on the environment and the terrain and all the rest of it.

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White

And just tell me, briefly, who her friends are.

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Atkinson

So, their friends are coming in at 12 o’clock, that’s Spin and he is a red rabbit.Ìý He’s non disabled.Ìý You’ll feel he’s got quite tall ears.Ìý So, one of the things that we did when we were designing this was consult visually impaired children about what they wanted to see or feel in these characters and one of the things that came back is we wanted to have different textures so that if these characters ever made it into being toys, that a blind child could pick them up and know by touch, primarily of the ears and of the texture of the fur, who they were.

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White

So, his ears they stick right up, don’t they, they stick right up.

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Atkinson

That’s it, that’s it.Ìý And also, if they were ever toys we wanted them to smell.Ìý So, Fred, who’s a young man now, he’s 14 but he started consulting on Mixmups when he was probably seven he said I would want Mixmup toys to have different scents, just in the way that your grandma has a scent or your parents have a scent, he wanted these characters to have a scent.Ìý So, they don’t smell at the moment but if they’re ever toys…

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White

If they’re ever toys, they’re going to.

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Atkinson

Then that’s the idea.Ìý So, that’s Spin.Ìý So, coming up in front of you, there, there you go, that is Giggle the Cat.Ìý She has got a wheelchair…

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White

Oh yes, I see.

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Atkinson

So, you’ll feel a wheelchair there.

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White

A wheelchair there, yeah.

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Atkinson

The other thing about her is that her body shape, the armature inside her body, has actually got curvature of the spine to give her an authentic gait.

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White

And the whole idea is just introducing these elements, almost under the surface as it were, yeah.

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Atkinson

That’s right, so very, very subtle.Ìý So, this is not a show about disability, it’s a show about magic and mixing.Ìý I shall give you now the wooden spoon, the magical wooden spoon.Ìý So, in front of you just beneath your hand is a box and it’s got a hole in the middle and four wheels, it’s blue, it’s got yellow stars all over it.Ìý So, in each episode the friends mix up an adventure, so they decide something like we want to go to the moon and eat a cheese sandwich on the moon.Ìý They place objects into this box, they take their magical wooden spoon and they mix up the magic inside the box with that spoon, just as you just did then.Ìý They get sucked inside the box and they go off on an adventure.

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White

They’re lovely textures, I mean even the box is really pleasing.

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Atkinson

And the idea really is that it’s all about mixing up the magic of play and imagination in all children but it’s executed with characters that have got lived experience of disability.

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White

Rebecca, take me back to the beginning. ÌýWhere did the idea of the Mixmups come from?

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Atkinson

The very, very beginning of Mixmups actually started with something called the Toy Like Me campaign which in 2015 I was tidying up my kid’s playroom and I noticed there were absolutely no representations of disabled toys, all I could find was grey sort of wheelchair figures – grandparents or people who’ve got a temporary impairment like breaking their leg.Ìý So, I began something called the Toy Like Me campaign where I made over toys with tiny little model hearing aids, so I had a photograph of Tinkerbell, put them online and they went viral with lots of people saying – oh my word, I really want to buy this, where can I get this.Ìý And I realised then that there was a big need for representation, positive representation, in children’s industries.

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White

I mean you have both a visual loss and a hearing loss…

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Atkinson

I do, yeah.

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White

… was this something, this lack of toys that represent, was it something you’d been aware of yourself as a child?

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Atkinson

Yeah, so I grew up hard of hearing and I wore hearing aids and I never ever saw anybody on TV that had hearing aids and I think that led to a sense of shame, I never wore my hair up until I was about 21.Ìý And then as I grew up, I had an eyesight condition – RP – which caused me to acquire tunnel vision.Ìý And I had to go through a process with that, of getting a guide dog and getting a white cane and really of having to face my internalised perception of what visual impairment was all about and that led me to sort of think about where we absorb those ideas from and if we don’t see positive representation of visual impairment then it can seem like a much scarier place than it really is.Ìý So, I did a bit of consultation work for a global toy brand but what came back after quite a lot of very creative consultation was one of their characters with dark black wraparound glasses, as a visually impaired person.Ìý And at that point my heart sunk because that is an enduring stereotype of blind people.Ìý And it was at that point that I thought – Okay, I’ve done all I can in terms of campaigning for this, I’ve consulted these toy brands and they’re still not getting it right, I’m going to have to do this myself.Ìý What I really wanted to look at and really dig down into storytelling and why representation keeps building the same narrative generation after generation, I wanted to find something that was universal.Ìý And in childhood there’s one thing that’s universal and that is play.Ìý And so I built the Mixmups brand around the magic of play and imagination.

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Mixmups clip

Hidden about my garden are some really special eggs.

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Ooohhh.

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But it’s not just about looking for eggs, you have to listen too.Ìý As you get near the eggs will beep to give you a clue where they are.

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Did you hear that beep? [Beeping] Yeahhhh. [Dog barking]Ìý And another.

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Atkinson

Mixmups is the only disabled led brand and so it speaks from the community with a lived experience and an authenticity.Ìý There isn’t anything else out there like that.

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White

And you’ve told me about the kind of… the actual physical being of these animals but what is the idea that you’re really trying to get across?

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Atkinson

I don’t think there is one idea, I think there’s multiple ideas.Ìý But one of the tag lines that is in the show, at the end of each episode when they find a solution to the problem, is that the Lucky Loover Bird, who’s the adult figure, she says – Yes, there’s always another way.Ìý It’s a metaphor really for problem solving but it’s also a metaphor for disability living because for me living with a disability is about innovation, it’s about always looking for a different way to do things.

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White

Yeah.Ìý I mean I’ve watched the one about them having races and they all raced in slightly different ways.

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Atkinson

Yeah, so that episode… it’s a kind of sport’s day episode.

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Mixmups clip

I’ve won.

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You’re too fast Giggle.

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I’m faster than you because I’ve got wheels.

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Maybe this is just a race that Giggle really good at.Ìý Perhaps it’s time for a different kind of race?Ìý This is the bean bag race.Ìý You need to be slow and steady to win this one.

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Whoooo, I’m the winner.

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Oh, that’s not fair.Ìý Pocket wasn’t even going very fast.

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Well, sometimes it’s the most careful person, not the fastest that wins.

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Atkinson

In traditional storytelling around disability might be told as in – oh well, the more able people hung back and allowed the disabled people to win and isn’t that nice and aren’t they virtuous by doing that.Ìý But in actual fact, it’s much more interesting and novel and fresher to tell that story from a different perspective, which is actually if we change the type of race and we run three different kinds of races, each of us will be the winner of one of those races.Ìý Spin ends up winning the zigzag race, where they do a zigzag course which is obviously harder for the guide dog user to get round and harder for the wheelchair user, so he finally manages to slow them down.Ìý So, there’s always a subversion with Mixmups storytelling and it’s about introducing children to the concept of environmental and attitudinal and social barriers.

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White

What about the actors here because one of the things which intrigued me is that the actors’ disabilities don’t coincide with the disabilities of the characters that they play?

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Atkinson

Well, there’s four characters in Mixmups, two of whom have got disabilities and two of whom haven’t but it was really important for me to cast the entire cast, using disabled actors.Ìý The reason being that there is absolutely tonnes of disabled talent out there that often gets overlooked.Ìý However, although there is a lot of talent out there it is a limited pool and so trying to match the disability with the actor with the right character for the character is such a matrix of needs that we had to compromise on some.Ìý The characters that play the children in Mixmups are all disabled but they don’t have matching impairments.Ìý The Lucky Loover Bird who’s not visually impaired in the series is played by a visually impaired actor.

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Dean

My name is Gillian Dean, I voice the character of the Lucky Loover Bird and her catchphrase is – As I say, there’s always another way.Ìý

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White

Tell me Gillian, what was it about the role that appealed to you?

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Dean

I mean I didn’t know when I first went for the role what Rebecca’s vision for the Loover Bird was, so all I knew about her was that she was going to be quite a compassionate, caring, supportive guiding sort of a character, which is a lovely thing to be.Ìý But I was particularly excited by the fact that she’s quite eccentric and that each week she would be playing a different character, so she’d be doing a different voice and a different kind of personality every week.Ìý I mean what a treat.

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White

And it was the Norfolk accent that I think Rebecca was so keen on having, wasn’t it?

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Dean

Yes, and I didn’t know about that, well she wasn’t sneaky but it wasn’t there in the brief, it said sort of regional accent preferred.Ìý And I mean, as you can tell, I don’t have a natural Norfolk accent but I’ve lived in Norfolk since I was seven years old, I lived amongst the accent, you know, a lot of my friends have a natural Norfolk accent.Ìý And I only thought at the last minute to include a Norfolk tape, which, fortunately, I put right at the beginning.

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White

Now your character, the Lucky Loover Bird, doesn’t have a disability.Ìý You have a visual impairment.Ìý Some of the other actors have disabilities but not the ones that correspond to their characters.Ìý What does that say about the philosophy really behind the show?

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Dean

I mean you mention that the Lucky Loover Bird doesn’t have a disability, we don’t know that she has a disability, she certainly hasn’t disclosed one and she doesn’t have a visible disability but there’s nothing to say she doesn’t have a disability and has just not brought it up.Ìý But I think in terms of casting disabled actors in this way, what you’re doing is you are facilitating disabled actors to get work but also, you are casting the right actor for the role, rather than the right disability for the role and I think that’s really, really important because that way it takes it back to an issue of it being about craft rather than it being simply focused on what your disability is.

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There are certainly a few episodes that are a bit more focused on the experience of those characters as disabled people.Ìý But, ultimately, the programme just sort of says – here are these characters, sometimes one of them might do something a bit differently to the way that you might.Ìý I think it’s really good for showing children that their friends, their family, their teachers might occasionally do something a bit differently from the way they do but it’s fine, it’s not a big deal and we can all just carry on.

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White

Hence the catchphrase, of course.

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Dean

Hence the catchphrase.Ìý Yeah, I have said that in so many different ways.Ìý It has been a genuine delight trying to find different ways of putting inflection into it.Ìý The Lucky Loover Bird’s pirate catchphrase might sound a bit like – arghh, as I say, there’s always another way.Ìý And the Lucky Loover Bird’s robot catchphrase might sound a little like this – [staccato] As I say, there’s always another way.

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White

What’s the next step for this?Ìý I mean you’ve got a 52-part series, which is great, what happens now?

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Atkinson

We’re still in production for the next year.Ìý Only 10 episodes of this show have actually gone out yet.Ìý There’s 10 more coming at the beginning of March.Ìý And then we don’t know yet.Ìý A lot of it will be dependent on what the audience reception is, what people think of it. ÌýBut I’d very much like to keep going if we can and get Mixmups to be a bit of a mainstay in children’s television because I think that there’s 150 million disabled children in the world and until now they haven’t really been culturally included.Ìý And I think because I’m a disabled creator, I’m able to think about access right from the beginning, rather than just tag it on the end.Ìý So, the production design of Mixmups is all high contrast, it’s all low visual clutter, so, if you’re a child who’s got some useful vision, partially sighted, then there’s less processing that you need to be able to sit back and enjoy it.

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White

And whether you’re five or 55 you can catch Rebecca Atkinson’s creations, the Mixmups, just after eight on Saturday and Sunday mornings on Channel 5’s Milkshake segment.Ìý You can tell us your reactions; we’d love to hear them.Ìý

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Also, advance notice of a technology fayre along the lines of Sight Village, which a lot of visually impaired people will know about, which is being held at the Europa Hotel in Belfast on Wednesday 28th February.Ìý It’s believed to be the first of its type on this scale in Northern Ireland with a whole range of technology and other services for visually impaired people on display.Ìý And we’re planning to be there as well.Ìý And we’d also be happy to hear of any stories relating to visually impaired people in Northern Ireland that you think we should be covering.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, you can leave voice messages on 0161 8361338.Ìý And there’s more information on our website bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý

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From me, Peter White, producer Beth Hemmings, the Mixmups team and studio managers Tom Parnell and Carwyn Griffith, goodbye.

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