CBBC's Horrible Histories: The Stone Age Report, May 2008

Mode

This piece is multimodal as it uses spoken word and visual aids.

Audience

The audience is a young audience, children aged 5-12

Purpose

It is aimed to educate children about the Stone Age and give children a basic knowledge of historiography.

It is also aimed to entertain children to maintain their focus and get them to learn more as they will enjoy watching and are then more susceptible to the message.

What is CBBC?

CBBC is the version of BBC aimed toward children

Horrible Histories

Is a Sketch show that aims to teach children about history, based upon the books written by Terry Dreary.

What is child-directed speech?

Language aimed towards children that involves melodic repetition, simplified vocabulary and repetitive questioning.

What type of Humour does this piece use?

Satirical Humour- of the news reader

Wordplay Humour- of the 'ice age' and 'stone age'

Physical Humour- engaging with the screen and hand gestures.

'hello and welcome to the news at when' and 'Thanks Anne'

This emulates the form of a news report, parodying modern media in order to create satirical humour.

The interaction between Bob and Anne conforms to the expectations of adjacency pairs.

Use Of hyperphora:

'When? Prehistoric Time'

Use of hyperphora and varied syntax here engages the viewers.

It also breaks the FoE of a news reader due to the element of humour

Use of deictic references:

'as you can see' , 'that...is Britain', 'do you recognise this fellow'

These are aimed to engage the audience from the get-go and they emphasise the importance of the visual aid that is used in this piece.

This emphasises the child audience as they have chosen to use two forms of stimuli to engage the children.

Use of direct address:

'you could walk to France, but please don't, because we have guests'

The direct address involves the readers and engages the child audience by referring to them several time, to maintain this engagement.

The use of colloquialism and high frequency lexis:

'Don't' and 'grizzly bear'

These are aimed to maintain common lexis and ensure that all viewers understand the message, another way to appeal to the children watching.

Use of Humour:

'and there goes the stones'

This is wordplay humour due to this being the 'stone age report'.

Paralinguistic show he is pointing to the screen whilst animated stones cover the screen.

Use of Vocalisation and Neologisms:

'Ta-ta-da-da'

This creates physical humour and aural humour to engage the children.

It also plays on the common idiom 'ta-da' used in many Children's show due to the melodic nature of the line helping to engage child viewers.

Use of Wordplay humour and prosodics:

'Homo heidelbergensis. Or heidi to his friends'

The change in pace from 'Homo heidelbergensis' to 'heidi to his friends' creates physical humour and engages the children further through this change.

The wordplay of 'heidi to his friends' engages the viewers and implies they are his friends as he refers to him as 'heidi' for the rest of the sketch.

Use of Internal Rhyme:

'There he is, 6 foot 1 and he is tons of fun and as hard as nails'

The internal rhyme of '6 foot 1 and he is tons of fun' appeals to children through the criteria of CDS as it uses melodic phrases.

Use of Polysyndetic listing and editing:

'Animals like hippos, and elephants and hamsters and lions, except no hamsters'

This rising polysyndetic is combined with image of each of the animals appearing on the screen.

When 'except not hamsters' is said the picture of the hasmert explodes accompanied with a small squeak.

The rising polysyndetic list and the Prosodics and paralinguistics of this moment create physical humour to engage the children and help ensure the information remains in their heads.

'and it's all jolly good fun'

Use of Prosodics and Paralinguistics:

'it's cold like ice, for an age. It's called an ice age'

The prosodics, he raises his voice here to emphasizes 'like ice' 'an age' and the exclamative 'it's called an ice age'. This is combined with the paralinguistics of him rubbing his arms and shivering.

Use of repetition:

'it's cold like ice, for an age. It's called an ice age'

The repetition of 'ice' and 'age' before they are brought together as one word helps to engage the children in a logical reasoning process.

This helps them to maintain the information they have been given as it essentially repeated to them.

Use of Bathos:

'And after here nothing happens'

There is a pause here it creates Bathos as the ending appears insufficient and boring in contrast to the earlier high energy moments.

Use of Exclamatives:

'But not for long!'

This contrast the Bathos that occurs just before it to re-engage the viewers through a rise in volume and pace of the news-report.

Use of Polysyndetic tripling and sub-clauses:

'Animals like mammoths, and wolves and, best of fall, megabears'

Polysyndetic tripling gives pace, accompanied by the sub-clause 'best of all' this build anticipation for the revelation of the 'megabears'.

This change in pace and creation of tension helps to maintain engagement from the viewers by giving them several things to focus on due to children's short attention spans.

Use of repetition and paralinguistics:

'Yes megabears, like a grizzly bear but twice the size. No it's bigger than that. Always bigger than that. There it is'

Repetition of 'bigger than that' done to emphasise the physical size of the bear and to help engage the audience.

The interaction with the screen here, directly addressing it and the size of the bears changing in response, helps to create physical humour to engage the child audience.

Use of an edited Idiom:

'Its mean, its lean'

This idiom creates wordplay humour to engage the viewers.

Use of Anaphoric referencing:

'not heidi anymore'

This anaphoric reference reinforces the previous people mentioned and reminds the viewers to help reinforce the educational purpose of the show.

Use of anaphora and exclamatives:

'neanderthal, big brow, big nose, big news!'

The anaphora of the infantile monosyllabic adjective 'big' appeals to the children through using the plain language of CDS.

The Exclamative at the end of the asyndetic list culminates the rising tricolon properly.

Use of Polyptoton and parallelism:

'he chases bears, he's chased by bears. He chases mammoth's, he's chased by mammoths'

The parallelism and polyptoton emphasises this idea to the viewers and creates physical humour as he runs across the screen along with the animation.

Use of direct address and anaphora:

'Its you, it's me, it's modern man'

The direct address to the viewers engages them directly and maintains the engagement created earlier.

The anaphora of 'it's' creates a rising tricolon, added to by the pace seen through the prosodics.

Use of repetition:

'great great great great great tons of time a million grandparents'

The repetition creates hyperbolic physical and wordplay humour to emphasise the age.

Use of Litotes:

'great, great, great, grandad gets a few jobs done'

The litotes of 'gets a few jobs done' ensures that this remains appealable and understandable to those younger audiences.

The lack of specificity to what they have made reinforces the child directed audience due to the avoidance of unnecessary information.

Use of Bathos and asyndetic listing:

'the wheel, beer, painting, archery and most important of all, farming'

The rising asyndetic list culminating in 'farming' creates Bathos due to 'farming' not appealing to the child audience.

This bathos is intensified by the use of a sub-clause 'an most important of all' to add to the rising tension, as done earlier in the piece.

Use of epistrophe and paralinguistics:

'Then it's iron age, roman age, middle age, modern age, act-your age, old age and the death... Ugh'

The epistrophe of 'age' emphasises the movement through time and the rising list culminates in the paralinguistic of 'death' as bob falls onto the floor pretending to be dead.