Balamory
Balamory is a live action television series on UK TV (BBC1 and CBeebies) for preschool children based around the small (fictional) island community of Balamory in Scotland. Each main character has their own coloured house in the town: Miss Hoolie, the nursery schoolteacher, lives in a green house Archie, the inventor, lives in a pink castle Josie Jump, the fitness instructor, lives in a three-story yellow house Edie McCredie, the bus driver, operates from a blue garage PC Plum, a camp policeman, works in a white police station Spencer, an American painter, lives in an orange house Suzie Sweet and Penny Pocket operate a sweet shop and tea room in a red house A typical episode begins with Miss Hoolie opening the nursery and telling the audience what the weather is like in Balamory today, and then meeting one of the other main characters who has a "problem" that can be solved by visiting another main character. The main character with the problem sings and dances to a calypso-style song to decide which of the coloured houses "is the one for me" (i.e. is the one where the helpful character lives), and then makes a procession of visits to various of the houses until the problem is solved. At each visit, the progress of the story to date is summarised by drawing a rainbow of balloons in the air with the hands: the balloons burst to reveal a flashback summary of today's "story in Balamory". Key phrases include: What's the story in Balamory? Wouldn't you like to know? I wonder who's coming to the Balamory nursery today? The programme is often watched by older students and the unemployed, who tune in to see the unspoken sexual tension between the schoolmistress and the policeman. Further innuendo is implicit in the "friendship" between Archie the inventor and P.C. Plum. The series is mostly filmed in the Scottish port town of Tobermory, with the exceptions of scenes in the nursery are filmed at a television studio in Glasgow, and Archie's castle (which is in fact at Fenton Tower in North Berwick).
External linksThe official Balamory website on the BBC
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