Mother’s stories brought to life

Press, 2 September 1980, Page 19

Mother’s stories brought to life

Stories an Ashburton woman wrote for her eight-year-old son 14 years ago have been turned into Television New Zealand’s latest series for children. Patricia Russell wrote stories in rhyming couplets about a group of characters caller the Pumbleduffs. A sub-editor and feature writer on the “Ashburton Guardian,” she was badgered into becoming a children’s writer when she bought her own typewriter. The same son, now an adult, persuaded her to submit her stories to Television New Zealand, where a Christchurch producer, Kim Gabara, took a liking to them.

Mr Gabara’s hardest task was deciding how to depict the Pumbleduffs on television, as everyone who read the original stories had a different idea of what they were like.

To get round this, he plumped for telling the story rather than depicting it, thus leaving the form of the Pumbleduffs to the imagination of individual child viewers. What all the Pumbleduffs look like in terms of shape, size, colour, and all the other factors, is left to the imagination. A Christchurch actor, .Tony Wahren, tells the tales, the first of which will be screened on Network One tomorrow.

“We have deliberately avoided giving any ideas, of, say, size, by keeping the sets as simple as possible and not including objects with which a direct size comparison could be made,”, said Mr Gabara.