My god, it’s a harsh world but in some ways it’s also the gift that keeps on giving. Like a lot of UK people, I grew up with (Little) Story Teller, a partwork series of magazines with accompanying tapes aimed at the 3 - 7 crowd. The talent working on these things was unbelievable - on Christmas Story Teller Two, linked below, you can hear the voices of Richard Briers, Sheila Hancock, Miriam Margoyles, Joss Ackland and Nigel Lambert, and the stories, poems and songs were perfectly chosen, featuring a mix of classics (Dickens, of course, for Christmas), contemporary children’s writing (I remember Jill Murphy’s Peace At Last) and original work, often featuring recurring characters specific to Little Story Teller.
The Christmas editions of Story Teller (the larger format magazine that preceded and somewhat overlapped the publication of Little Story Teller) are legit Things I Would Save From A Fire. They’re tattered and falling apart and I love them, and some public spirited people have put One, Two and Three on YouTube, which is a great help given that my tape of Three tragically disappeared many years ago. I just... I can’t even tell you how big a part of childhood Christmasses these things were.
So, to discover that the members of a Facebook fan group have, with the original publisher’s permission, got together and made a special 2021 Christmas Story Teller with their own creative contributions? AND they’ve got the creator of the Shorty the Starship stories which appeared in the originals to come back and do another story? It’s a Christmas miracle. 🥰
