Can you dig it? I mean... You've got to dig!

This is one of the series which was still there on the video when I found it in summer 2002, and, indeed, which I went on to make the website about. Educational kids' TV at its best. A series about everyday events which kids can learn basic scientific facts from. Animated fantasy sequences illustrating characters' thoughts. Songs which are outside the story's continuity which may or may not have been sung by members of the cast. Dialogue which doesn't patronize the five-or-six-year-old kids in the audience but which doesn't aim too far over their heads either... (Actually, one of Charles Way's episodes would have illustrated this point a bit better) in particular, no smirking innuendo. You can read what I thought about the series back in Ought Two here.



Oh, and those shots of flowers opening up seemed to be in every schools TV programme back in the early 90s.

Use your imagination!

Some seven years ago I found a bunch of videotapes which had been hidden away in a cupboard. The videos contained educational kids TV programmes from about ten years earlier. Some of them were from the famous "Look and Read" series, which inspired me to discover Ben Clarke's site devoted to the "Look and Read" stories (at the time it was not part of the Broadcast for Schools site, which didn't exist back then) and create my own (much more simple-looking) website about two of the other "schools progs" from my kidhood - "Thinkabout Science" and "Science Challenge" -- with a LOT of help from Ben Clarke!

One series, however, I did not find any of was "Over the Moon". This was a Scottish show, starring a one-man-band who went by the name of "Mr Boom", which sort of rhymes with the name of the show. I didn't find any episodes because they were all on one video, and we taped over that video long ago, with some other educational stuff (including, I think, some "Look and Read") and then partly with "The Simpsons" until I discovered there was some "Look and Read" on it.

It's a shame that "Over the Moon" has been lost to the ages, though. What I remember is this:

It took place in a glass dome, purportedly on the surface of the Moon.
Mr Boom looked through a telescope to watch people on Earth, doing some sort of activity. The only one I remember was building a house, specifically the roof of a house, and Mr Boom explaining that this was to stop all the rain from getting in.
The second part of each episode involved some sort of guest, visiting him on the moon, and singing a song or reading a story. Actually, this may have only happened once, and I could be wrong about the song or story, except that most TV programmes for kids of that age tended to end with a song or a story.
The theme song included the lines: "Use your imagination, to jump over the moon, over the moon" and a harmonica solo. When they broadcast closing credits, it included the lines "You have used your imagination to jump over the moon, over the moon, return to your Earth location..."

I never really paid attention to the name of the guy playing Mr Boom. I guess I just assumed Boom was his real surname. I did realise that it wasn't really filmed on the Moon, though. And you know how I knew? When Mr Boom looked at the Earth, he looked through a telescope that pointed up the way. But everyone knows the Moon is *above* the Earth. So surely his telescope should be pointing down!