When you’re very young, life is certainly dramatic. It’s easy to forget that each new pre-school moment can bring a succession of  ‘firsts’; brand new experiences which can provoke, challenge and confront.  Young children feel intense joy, disappointment, rage and often sheer delight when they are doing even the smallest things; they’re a bit ultra-human in this way. Our Bing series seeks to authentically mirror a young child’s experience and celebrates the noisy, joyful, messy reality of pre-school life.

For grown-ups, sharing your life with a Bingster is no less dramatic. Relating to a very young child as he or she quickly grows, learns and develops can be as stressful as it is joyful, as you deal with the complex range of new, and often challenging, behaviours that occur at this age – all with the added pressure of wanting to make everything ‘perfect’ and to do everything ‘right’.

Flop is the grown-up in Bing’s life. Whenever Bing needs him, Flop is there to help guide Bing through the everyday ups and downs of being a pre-schooler. Our individual films celebrate the realities of loving a pre-school child. They acknowledge that sometimes, things don’t go according to plan, using the power of story to explore strategies, in a gentle non “teachy-preachy” way, for both children and grown-ups when confronting similar situations in their own lives.

Ted Dewan’s hugely popular Bing books introduced us to Bing and Flop, the first two inhabitants of Bing’s World, with deceptively simple, insightful stories celebrating the ups and downs of their everyday lives.

Bing was identified as the most promising idea for a new television series by veteran Producer, Mikael Shields, from a pool of over 600 ideas. A lengthy creative adaptation of the original Bing books, over a five year period, by an extraordinarily committed and talented team, created Bing’s friends, community, and wider world. Through the investment into, and creation of, 3 successive pilots for television, Bing’s simple story-structures and tone of voice, emerged. Central to this process was also a deep immersion into Bing’s mission-critical developmental and educational values for young children, which grew to inform the project’s storytelling values and goals at the deepest level.

This creative journey was courageously backed by the then leadership of the BBC’s dedicated CBeebies channel, and has resulted in an iconic International Emmy award-winning television series that is ground-breaking in its truthfulness. It brings to life – in what Team Bing have christened its ‘microdramas’ – the full range of pre-school behaviour and experience, in a way that is supportive, positive and non-judgmental for ‘Bingsters’ (as we call them) and for the grown-ups in their lives.