Singing, dancing and barking are out, but Sesame Street is teaching Afghan children to count, read and write
Ever since they made their first appearance on a New York sidestreet in the 1960s, Big Bird and his pals have taught children around the world how to count, read and write.
Now the cast of Sesame Street has made it all the way to Afghanistan, with a few nips and tucks to make them palatable to the local audience.
Launching on Thursday evening, out goes anything that could be interpreted as encouraging children to sing, dance – or even bark like dogs.
With parents thought likely to frown on their children singing and dancing in front of the TV, the stars of Baghch-e-Simsim exhort their young viewers to "exercise" instead.
"We tested a scene where Ernie is barking like a dog and getting Bert to copy him, but we found that parents were dead set against it," says Tania Farzana the Afghan-American executive producer of the show. "A dog is considered to be unclean, so the parents didn't understand it."
The programme is a co-production between the non-profit Sesame Workshop and Moby Media, an Afghan company that specialises in bringing western TV formats such as Pop Idol and Deal or No Deal to Afghan screens.
With funding from the US state department, 26 programmes have been made at the scruffy central Kabul street where Moby is based. The programme will air four times a week on both its Dari and Pashtu language channels. But, although Big Bird has been renamed "King of the birds", the cultural accommodation has not all been one way.
Sesame Workshop executives in the US keep tight control over how their international partners refit their show. One segment recorded in Afghanistan involving a family car ride had to be dropped because, as with nearly all local motorists, no one was wearing a seatbelt.
And in a country where health and safety is unheard of, producers struggled to find a building site to film where workmen wore hard hats, sturdy shoes and protective clothing.
Nonetheless, the Sesame Street formula remains fundamentally intact, with cheery, brightly coloured puppets keeping children entertained while the programme delivers some carefully targeted educational messages, including the famous "letter of the day" and plenty of maths.
"In a country with an extremely young population and an education system that is not up to standard, then reaching millions of kids through television seems to us the way to go," said Saad Mohseni, chief executive of Moby Media.
Also present in the Afghan version is the social activism that once caused consternation in parts of 1970s America with its portrayal of a racially harmonious inner-city neighbourhood. For a film about a girl's first day at school, the Afghan production team deliberately chose a character from the Hazara community, a much put-upon minority in a country where there are growing fears of ethnic fragmentation.
Sherrie Westin, vice-president of Sesame Workshop, said the programme's daily mini-documentaries about the daily lives Afghan children "celebrate diversity and introduce children from Afghanistan's various provinces to each other".
Compared to many of the other 22 international Sesame co-productions there will be no new puppeteering in Afghanistan for the time being. Instead, the show's makers pick from vast amounts of already recorded video, which is then voiced over.
Moby Media, with its stable of Indian and Turkish soaps that have to be translated into local languages, has mastered the art of dubbing.
But revoicing a muppet poses different challenges, says Ali Abdullah Vakili, the 23-year-old voice of Big Bird. Because they speak by "mouth flapping" the Afghan scripts have to match the same syllables as the English original. "It's much harder than doing humans," Vakili says. "The first time I saw it I thought it was impossible."
