Educational 70s and 80s BBC television programme aiming to get kids to read and enjoy books. The format changed, but not very much, as the seasons progressed.

Each series would concentrate on one specific book, which would be serialised: The Gas Gun is the one that springs to mind. They'd show a bit of the serial at the beginning of each programme and then revisit it during the rest of it, with the words of the story underneath the picture.

They also had a 'thing' called Wordy - a sort of puppet that would 'help' with whatever was going on. My favourite bit was 'the blurry word', a reading strategy, where a word that is not known (hence 'blurry word') is investigated by analysing the words around it. Very cool stuff indeed.

Songs added to the proceedings. 'Little i' was excellent, and sung at least (if not penned, I don't know) by the fabulous Derek Griffiths. 'Build Yourself a Word' was excellent too. It seems to me that kids' tv has very little to compare with this sort of excellent programming.

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