Adamo Bertacchi-Morroni plays Baby Jake, a photorealistic infant head grafted onto a cartoon body, while his real brother Franco supplies on-screen antics and Kaizer Akhtar voices Isaac, the five-year-old narrator who deciphers Jake’s gurgles for the audience. The boys are the youngest of ten siblings, all living in a technicolour windmill where each episode launches them on a short, song-heavy journey triggered by a simple object: a balloon, a bubble, a star. Episodes run eleven minutes, fast enough to outrun a toddler’s attention span yet slow enough for the target two-to-four demographic to join the repeated chorus of “Goggy gone!”
Darrall Macqueen produced the 52-part series for £1.85 million with Dublin studio JAM Media, backing coming from CBeebies and the Irish Film Board. Creator Maddy Darrall got the idea watching her own seven-year-old interpret his baby brother, and she gambled on authentic pre-school speech rather than the usual adult narrator, a choice the Guardian called “a risk” in the lucrative pre-school market. Lead writer Dave Ingham, fresh from Charlie and Lola, kept scripts minimal, leaning on call-and-response rhymes and a rotating stable of folk-pop tracks composed by Richie Webb that parents quietly Shazam in the kitchen.
The show premiered on 4 July 2011 and clocked out fifteen months later, but episodes lingered on BBC iPlayer and YouTube, turning Jake’s babbling catchphrases into playground currency long after CBeebies had moved on to the next brightly coloured curiosity.
Production Details
CBeebies / 2 Seasons / 52 Episodes / 2011
Producer(s): Maddy Darrall
Main Cast
Adamo Bertacchi-Morroni as Baby Jake
