Magnús Scheving, the man behind the moustache, talks to Simon Mills
Friday November 24, 2006
The Guardian Photograph: Getty Images
Not sure if you happened to be watching the Nick Jr channel at 9.30 the other morning, but if you were, you would have seen something extraordinary: the sight of a grown man of dynamic, northern-hemisphere extraction, dressed in a cobalt blue-and-white tracksuit, using nothing but a pair of skilfully manoeuvred tennis racquets to deftly deflect volley after volley of marshmallows as they were fired at him from a cannon contraption by a dastardly Jim Carrey-lookalike.
Then, still under attack from the evil, e-number hurling adversary, this man with the extraordinary moustache, this man called "Sportacus", blurred his way on to a skateboard and threw a series of wildly balletic, aerobic, pantomimic shapes as he did so.
Finally the chisel-faced hero (think Freddie Ljungberg in a Power Ranger's costume) demanded a jolt of fortifying "sport candy" (aka an apple) from a little girl with pink hair, before he set about finishing off his enemy by kicking dozens of footballs at him. Then he returned to his Daz-white spaceship in the sky by way of a wind-powered airborne bicycle.
Now, if you have absolutely no idea what we are talking about here, may I be the first to say: "Mu-um! Da-aaad! Old person! Duh! Like ... where have you been?" And second, I will explain that this is LazyTown, the fastest-moving, fastest-selling kids' TV show of the moment, now broadcast in 103 countries and currently showing on BBC, CBBC, CBeebies and Nick Jr in the UK.
Spin-offs of the Icelandic show include books, a stage musical, a radio station, bottled water, Sportacus action figures, interactive games, costumes and, crucially, a highly successful anti-obesity and healthy eating drive that in Iceland achieved 100% participation from its four- to seven-year-old target-market and was directly responsible for a 22% increase in the sale of vegetables nationwide. Sportacus even managed to persuade Iceland's cinemas to sell snack packets of baby carrots to kids instead of the usual ice cream and popcorn. Nowadays, kids in Iceland go to bed at exactly 8.08pm, because that's when Sportacus goes to bed.
This weekend the show is nominated for a Children's Bafta for best international show. "LazyTown is not just a town, it's also a state of mind," says Magnús Scheving, the Iceland-born star who plays Sportacus, when I meet him. "It's the negative influence on your shoulder making you lazy and not caring about anything." Scheving is also the writer and director of the show, and the CEO, creator and co-founder of LazyTown Entertainment.
In the TV show, Sportacus is always hovering over LazyTown inspiring kids to switch off their video games console and to stop eating junk food. "To get up and do something RIGHT NOW! To be energetic! It's all about energy and excitement!" says Scheving.
In the adrenaline-fuelled Trumpton that is LazyTown, the camera is always moving. The drama is high-energy, relentless, short-attention-span stuff; a clever mixture of computer animation, CGI, flesh-and-blood actors, animatronics and latex puppetry. The sets and props are free of straight lines, the soundtrack is an aurally unpredictable cacophony of parps, honks and tinny organ chords. The colour palette is a trippy, hyper-real rainbow of vision-zonking, 64-bit intensity while LazyTown's songs have the gnawing, novelty-hit insistence that puts one in mind of the Aqua back catalogue. For God's sake, don't watch it if you have a hangover.
Scheving certainly won't. "I've never been drunk in my life," he says. "I've never even tasted beer."
He looks good on it, too: he is an enormously likeable, showroom-condition 42-year-old who, if he wasn't committed to battling global obesity, could quite easily become the forth member of A-Ha. He is apparently a big hit with mothers worldwide, but in real life is as good as married to his partner of 17 years, Ragnheidur Melstead, LazyTown's head of business affairs, and they have three young children.
How is he at home? "Lousy husband but good father, I think," he says with a grin. A very good father, by the sound of it. "At the weekends I usually have around 50 kids running around in my back garden. They are all friends of my kids. I know all their names. We have barbecues, put up tents, and play soccer. I love it."
I meet up with Scheving at the Sanderson hotel in London, where he is holding court at a corner table of the trendy Spoon restaurant, talking to the waiter in fluent Swedish and ordering off-menu (steak frites, medium rare, a salad to start) with the casual insouciance that evidently comes naturally to a multimillionaire kids' TV entrepreneur.
He is a busy man. This is the first of two visits to London inside one week, he tells me. Recently he went to Australia for just 48 hours; last year he went to New York more than 50 times. Things were never like this for the Playaway crew.
Scheving tells me that earlier in the week he was lunching in a similarly fashionable London diner and witnessed a hostile couple grumble loudly about some roustabouting children who wouldn't stay at their table with their parents and used the aisles as their playground. The complaint was quickly challenged by the voice of a woman who countered that everyone in the room should be delighted to see any kids running around. "There are two types of people in the world," he says. "People who like kids, and people who don't. People who complain about kids screaming on aeroplanes and in restaurants and those people who love kids and enjoy their energy and enjoy hearing the noise they make and get off on their energy. I am one of those people who happens to love kids."
This morning, his press officer tells me, he opened a Sportacus branded sports centre in Wembley and, using his healthy mix of aerobic moves and upbeat, invigorating, "get your move on" banter, he had 500 kids eating out of his hand.
"The worst mistake you can make with children," says Scheving, "is to talk to them in a condescending, patronising way and think that you can teach them something. You have to understand that it is you who will be learning from them. You have to get into their world and see things from their perspective. You have to be always moving and being positive and making sure that something exciting is always just about to happen."
Scheving's overachieving CV is varied, to say the least. Just listening to him describe it is exhausting. At first he wanted to be an architect but ended up as a carpenter, a skill that helped him build his own house. "And by that I mean physically built the house," he says. "I laid every brick and roof tile."
Then, on a whim, a woodworking pal bet Scheving that he couldn't become world champion at a sport of his workmate's choosing inside three years. Clearly, frozen tundra carpenters have a finely honed sense of humour because he chose for Scheving competitive aerobics, a cult-appeal sporting pursuit that finds contenders attempting a series of increasingly technical "jumps" - a conventional star jump, say, which is completed by the aerobic master landing, up-ended, on a single hand, instead of two feet. To become a champion, one has to complete as many of these fairy-dusted technical feats inside two minutes.
And guess what? Scheving, a tenacious chap, actually did it. Well, just about. Within the allotted three years he was silver medallist in the world aerobics championships, winning the European championships in 1994 and 1995.
He notices me smirking. "You think aerobics is not a cool sport?" he says, playfully. "I think you are wrong. It requires amazing discipline - flexibility, fitness, knowledge. And you have to do it with a big smile on your face. Also, I once performed in front of 10,000 screaming women. I tell you something, I'd rather do that than kick a ball around in front of a few men." He is non-competitive these days but Scheving still likes to maintain peak aerobic form. "I already did 4,000 jumps in my room today."
The contests gave him a taste for performing. He landed himself a chatshow on Icelandic telly and he became a much in-demand motivational speaker, talking to adults about a range of subjects including drugs, ageing, business and happiness. "More than 400 live events in 52 countries," he beams.
He found his niche with kids when Icelandic parents, concerned that their nation was now ranked as one of the world's top-10 fattest countries (20% overweight, 3% morbidly obese), continued to ask him the same questions about their children's exercise and nutrition programmes. So, back in 1991, inspired by his own three kids and on a mission to educate through entertainment, Scheving reinvented himself as a sort of spandex Jamie Oliver, aka Sportacus, the all-active, fruit-and-fibre saviour of LazyTown.
Unusually, the first waves of merchandising and spin-offs came before the TV show because Scheving, determined that LazyTown should always strive for the highest quality, wanted to do his research first. Ten years of meticulous research, as it turned out.
"When I was researching the show (back in 1999) I discovered two things. First, that hardly anyone who was making kids' shows actually had kids of their own, and second, that the budgets were always so much lower than for adult shows. Why? Why do they have to be cheap? When I am 65 I won't be caring about quality. But when you are a kid your senses are on fire and you have a highly tuned perception of quality." Accordingly, each episode of LazyTown costs $1m. "It's the most expensive children's show in the world," Scheving claims.
LazyTown is made in a purpose-built studio just outside Reykjavik that Scheving boasts is among the most technologically advanced in the world. Facilities include a huge green screen, a $1m, 27.6m-pixels Viper FilmStream Camera and a specially commissioned 70 terabyte processing unit that is kept under carefully climatically controlled conditions in case of spontaneous combustion.
Uniquely, the LazyTown studio has the ability to project ultra-high-definition backgrounds on to its green screen stage and shoot them directly, the various latex and humanoid players interacting with visible images rather than imagined ones. "We are above industry standard in HD," says Scheving.
The studio's maverick trickery recently engendered a jaw-dropping "how are they doing this?" response from a visiting Hanna-Barbera representative. CGI wizards who have also worked on Troy and The Last Samurai now work on LazyTown and in October the studio got a visit from Quentin Tarantino, who was researching special effects for his latest project. "He was totally amazed by the whole thing," says Ágúst Ingason, LazyTown's executive vice-president.
The Kill Bill director, puppet master of some memorably violent aerobic interludes, must have been delighted to note cinematic nods to Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuited character, the Bride, in LazyTown's blue-tracksuited Sportacus. But Scheving isn't planning on venturing into adult entertainment just yet.
What is so refreshing about LazyTown is the way it is aimed squarely at young kids and doesn't make any attempt at arch, recherché pop-culture references for the parents. It's a purist approach that has won over the lazy kids of little Iceland (population just 300,000), got them to eat "sport candy" instead of teeth-rotting candy, inspired them to "get their move on", to play soccer and tennis instead of sitting around in front of the X-Box. "I know it's ironic that they have to sit and watch TV to learn this stuff," says Scheving. "But television can be inspirational for healthy living. Remember Jane Fonda's work-out videos?"
So, is Sportacus, the Fonda de nos enfants, capable of taking on the rest of the world? "Oh, LazyTown will conquer the whole world," says Sheving confidently. And with that, he picks up a pair of tennis racquets and starts batting his five-quid plate of french fries across the room, much to the surprise of the Prada-clad mojito drinkers at the bar.
Then, still under attack from the evil, e-number hurling adversary, this man with the extraordinary moustache, this man called "Sportacus", blurred his way on to a skateboard and threw a series of wildly balletic, aerobic, pantomimic shapes as he did so.
Finally the chisel-faced hero (think Freddie Ljungberg in a Power Ranger's costume) demanded a jolt of fortifying "sport candy" (aka an apple) from a little girl with pink hair, before he set about finishing off his enemy by kicking dozens of footballs at him. Then he returned to his Daz-white spaceship in the sky by way of a wind-powered airborne bicycle.
Now, if you have absolutely no idea what we are talking about here, may I be the first to say: "Mu-um! Da-aaad! Old person! Duh! Like ... where have you been?" And second, I will explain that this is LazyTown, the fastest-moving, fastest-selling kids' TV show of the moment, now broadcast in 103 countries and currently showing on BBC, CBBC, CBeebies and Nick Jr in the UK.
Spin-offs of the Icelandic show include books, a stage musical, a radio station, bottled water, Sportacus action figures, interactive games, costumes and, crucially, a highly successful anti-obesity and healthy eating drive that in Iceland achieved 100% participation from its four- to seven-year-old target-market and was directly responsible for a 22% increase in the sale of vegetables nationwide. Sportacus even managed to persuade Iceland's cinemas to sell snack packets of baby carrots to kids instead of the usual ice cream and popcorn. Nowadays, kids in Iceland go to bed at exactly 8.08pm, because that's when Sportacus goes to bed.
This weekend the show is nominated for a Children's Bafta for best international show. "LazyTown is not just a town, it's also a state of mind," says Magnús Scheving, the Iceland-born star who plays Sportacus, when I meet him. "It's the negative influence on your shoulder making you lazy and not caring about anything." Scheving is also the writer and director of the show, and the CEO, creator and co-founder of LazyTown Entertainment.
In the TV show, Sportacus is always hovering over LazyTown inspiring kids to switch off their video games console and to stop eating junk food. "To get up and do something RIGHT NOW! To be energetic! It's all about energy and excitement!" says Scheving.
In the adrenaline-fuelled Trumpton that is LazyTown, the camera is always moving. The drama is high-energy, relentless, short-attention-span stuff; a clever mixture of computer animation, CGI, flesh-and-blood actors, animatronics and latex puppetry. The sets and props are free of straight lines, the soundtrack is an aurally unpredictable cacophony of parps, honks and tinny organ chords. The colour palette is a trippy, hyper-real rainbow of vision-zonking, 64-bit intensity while LazyTown's songs have the gnawing, novelty-hit insistence that puts one in mind of the Aqua back catalogue. For God's sake, don't watch it if you have a hangover.
Scheving certainly won't. "I've never been drunk in my life," he says. "I've never even tasted beer."
He looks good on it, too: he is an enormously likeable, showroom-condition 42-year-old who, if he wasn't committed to battling global obesity, could quite easily become the forth member of A-Ha. He is apparently a big hit with mothers worldwide, but in real life is as good as married to his partner of 17 years, Ragnheidur Melstead, LazyTown's head of business affairs, and they have three young children.
How is he at home? "Lousy husband but good father, I think," he says with a grin. A very good father, by the sound of it. "At the weekends I usually have around 50 kids running around in my back garden. They are all friends of my kids. I know all their names. We have barbecues, put up tents, and play soccer. I love it."
I meet up with Scheving at the Sanderson hotel in London, where he is holding court at a corner table of the trendy Spoon restaurant, talking to the waiter in fluent Swedish and ordering off-menu (steak frites, medium rare, a salad to start) with the casual insouciance that evidently comes naturally to a multimillionaire kids' TV entrepreneur.
He is a busy man. This is the first of two visits to London inside one week, he tells me. Recently he went to Australia for just 48 hours; last year he went to New York more than 50 times. Things were never like this for the Playaway crew.
Scheving tells me that earlier in the week he was lunching in a similarly fashionable London diner and witnessed a hostile couple grumble loudly about some roustabouting children who wouldn't stay at their table with their parents and used the aisles as their playground. The complaint was quickly challenged by the voice of a woman who countered that everyone in the room should be delighted to see any kids running around. "There are two types of people in the world," he says. "People who like kids, and people who don't. People who complain about kids screaming on aeroplanes and in restaurants and those people who love kids and enjoy their energy and enjoy hearing the noise they make and get off on their energy. I am one of those people who happens to love kids."
This morning, his press officer tells me, he opened a Sportacus branded sports centre in Wembley and, using his healthy mix of aerobic moves and upbeat, invigorating, "get your move on" banter, he had 500 kids eating out of his hand.
"The worst mistake you can make with children," says Scheving, "is to talk to them in a condescending, patronising way and think that you can teach them something. You have to understand that it is you who will be learning from them. You have to get into their world and see things from their perspective. You have to be always moving and being positive and making sure that something exciting is always just about to happen."
Scheving's overachieving CV is varied, to say the least. Just listening to him describe it is exhausting. At first he wanted to be an architect but ended up as a carpenter, a skill that helped him build his own house. "And by that I mean physically built the house," he says. "I laid every brick and roof tile."
Then, on a whim, a woodworking pal bet Scheving that he couldn't become world champion at a sport of his workmate's choosing inside three years. Clearly, frozen tundra carpenters have a finely honed sense of humour because he chose for Scheving competitive aerobics, a cult-appeal sporting pursuit that finds contenders attempting a series of increasingly technical "jumps" - a conventional star jump, say, which is completed by the aerobic master landing, up-ended, on a single hand, instead of two feet. To become a champion, one has to complete as many of these fairy-dusted technical feats inside two minutes.
And guess what? Scheving, a tenacious chap, actually did it. Well, just about. Within the allotted three years he was silver medallist in the world aerobics championships, winning the European championships in 1994 and 1995.
He notices me smirking. "You think aerobics is not a cool sport?" he says, playfully. "I think you are wrong. It requires amazing discipline - flexibility, fitness, knowledge. And you have to do it with a big smile on your face. Also, I once performed in front of 10,000 screaming women. I tell you something, I'd rather do that than kick a ball around in front of a few men." He is non-competitive these days but Scheving still likes to maintain peak aerobic form. "I already did 4,000 jumps in my room today."
The contests gave him a taste for performing. He landed himself a chatshow on Icelandic telly and he became a much in-demand motivational speaker, talking to adults about a range of subjects including drugs, ageing, business and happiness. "More than 400 live events in 52 countries," he beams.
He found his niche with kids when Icelandic parents, concerned that their nation was now ranked as one of the world's top-10 fattest countries (20% overweight, 3% morbidly obese), continued to ask him the same questions about their children's exercise and nutrition programmes. So, back in 1991, inspired by his own three kids and on a mission to educate through entertainment, Scheving reinvented himself as a sort of spandex Jamie Oliver, aka Sportacus, the all-active, fruit-and-fibre saviour of LazyTown.
Unusually, the first waves of merchandising and spin-offs came before the TV show because Scheving, determined that LazyTown should always strive for the highest quality, wanted to do his research first. Ten years of meticulous research, as it turned out.
"When I was researching the show (back in 1999) I discovered two things. First, that hardly anyone who was making kids' shows actually had kids of their own, and second, that the budgets were always so much lower than for adult shows. Why? Why do they have to be cheap? When I am 65 I won't be caring about quality. But when you are a kid your senses are on fire and you have a highly tuned perception of quality." Accordingly, each episode of LazyTown costs $1m. "It's the most expensive children's show in the world," Scheving claims.
LazyTown is made in a purpose-built studio just outside Reykjavik that Scheving boasts is among the most technologically advanced in the world. Facilities include a huge green screen, a $1m, 27.6m-pixels Viper FilmStream Camera and a specially commissioned 70 terabyte processing unit that is kept under carefully climatically controlled conditions in case of spontaneous combustion.
Uniquely, the LazyTown studio has the ability to project ultra-high-definition backgrounds on to its green screen stage and shoot them directly, the various latex and humanoid players interacting with visible images rather than imagined ones. "We are above industry standard in HD," says Scheving.
The studio's maverick trickery recently engendered a jaw-dropping "how are they doing this?" response from a visiting Hanna-Barbera representative. CGI wizards who have also worked on Troy and The Last Samurai now work on LazyTown and in October the studio got a visit from Quentin Tarantino, who was researching special effects for his latest project. "He was totally amazed by the whole thing," says Ágúst Ingason, LazyTown's executive vice-president.
The Kill Bill director, puppet master of some memorably violent aerobic interludes, must have been delighted to note cinematic nods to Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuited character, the Bride, in LazyTown's blue-tracksuited Sportacus. But Scheving isn't planning on venturing into adult entertainment just yet.
What is so refreshing about LazyTown is the way it is aimed squarely at young kids and doesn't make any attempt at arch, recherché pop-culture references for the parents. It's a purist approach that has won over the lazy kids of little Iceland (population just 300,000), got them to eat "sport candy" instead of teeth-rotting candy, inspired them to "get their move on", to play soccer and tennis instead of sitting around in front of the X-Box. "I know it's ironic that they have to sit and watch TV to learn this stuff," says Scheving. "But television can be inspirational for healthy living. Remember Jane Fonda's work-out videos?"
So, is Sportacus, the Fonda de nos enfants, capable of taking on the rest of the world? "Oh, LazyTown will conquer the whole world," says Sheving confidently. And with that, he picks up a pair of tennis racquets and starts batting his five-quid plate of french fries across the room, much to the surprise of the Prada-clad mojito drinkers at the bar.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario