What is a universal story in 2019?

I am currently head writing a new cartoon series. The show will air in 2020 and will be broadcasting in every country in the world. Sounds great right? And in one way it is. It gives me a tremendous sense of satisfaction to sit in a shed in Croydon and know that the stories I am creating will be seen by millions of children in countries I will never visit. However, the flipside of this is that every story I and my team create has to be just as accessible to a child in London as it is to a child in Hanoi - and everywhere in between…. There’s the rub.

Now you might think a child is a child is a child. Certain stories will always appeal no matter where that child is from. And again, to a certain extent, you’d be right. What that doesn’t factor in is the restrictions different broadcasters put on what you can and can’t write about.

In the Middle East there’s no magic or witchcraft. You can’t have homosexual characters and only the most conservative mixed relationships can appear on the screen. There’s no pork products – so ham sandwiches are out – as are pizzas just in case they have pepperoni on them.

On the subject of food, the French broadcasters are on a healthy eating drive which means all food shown on screen needs to be healthy, so pizzas would be out anyway. So too would be any sweets or biscuits, pasta, noodles, meat that isn’t grilled and an ‘abundance of bread.’ But they’re fine with gay characters. Not that we could have them.

The British are keen to model good behaviour and are hot on imitable stuff that may lead to letters in the Daily Mail. So – and I kid you not – we have one particular story where some animals hijack a vehicle from some humans. That’s fine. But they have to wear seatbelts, drive on the road and use a designated slipway when driving into the sea. 

As a sidebar, if you’ve ever wondered why Dennis the Menace has become Dennis and Gnasher, look no further – we can’t have kids being menaces these days. This also makes a particular form of universal visual humour very difficult to get away –slapstick.  If you do have slapstick humour, no one can get hurt. So there’s definitely no slapping with sticks in slapstick.

The Chinese have some issues with other races, in particular the Japanese, so we can’t show sushi. Chalk that up with pizza. They are also conservative in what relationships can be shown on screen. They are however very keen on fireworks. Unfortunately all the other broadcasters hate them so they’re out too.

Maybe fairy tales would be a source of fun? You’d be right. But only for certain cultures. How can you be sure that the kids in Bangkok know about Goldilocks or Sleeping Beauty? And if they do, have Disney already done the definitive version? In which case you can’t touch it with a bargepole.

A good old Christmas Special should be hard to argue with. Unless your culture doesn’t celebrate Christmas of course. And if it does celebrate Christmas is there snow? And Christmas trees? Best not call it a Christmas special just to be sure. A case in point – my recent Danger Mouse Christmas Special has no references to Christmas at all.

So how do you create a story with all of these restrictions? More importantly how do you do it 52 times? The answer is, with great difficulty. I liken it to playing one of those buzzing wire games. If you can get to the end of the wire without anything buzzing, you’ve got yourself a story. Maybe. So long as it comes in on budget.

This is quite a modern phenomenon. We live in a global society. Previously, if a cartoon was going to be made for the UK, then the BBC would pay for it and they’d be the only broadcaster we would have to worry about. Fifteen years ago, the very idea of an American network being able to sell a cartoon and the ensuing merchandise to Saudi Arabia or China would have been unthinkable, now it’s all part of the business plan. Cartoons have become more expensive, to get them made you need global partners, that means those global partners have a say in what gets made and naturally they want to make sure their interests are served and represented.  

Where the TV world leads I am sure the world of books will follow. I already know that there is a lack of appetite for rhyming picture books – it makes them hard to translate. I was asked to tone down the girlfriend/boyfriend plot in a recent series of middle grade books so that it will sell to the Chinese market and on one memorable occasion I was asked to remove a reference to a sausage dog in case it offended the Middle East. I did point out that it wasn’t literally a dog made of sausages, but dachshund was our ultimate compromise.

Where does that leave us as creators? Is there still space for the stories we want to tell? Is there still space for region specific stories, or as publishers become multinationals are we obliged to create work for a multinational audience if we want them to buy it?

The stories I am creating are still fun. I am still proud of them. They still work. But increasingly they are stories no one can argue with. Perhaps that’s the true definition of a universal story in 2019.