‘What Sesame Street does is easy,’ Scheving insists, in his Icelandic burr.
He is standing next to 7ft-long silver spaceship a key prop on the show and energetically eating a raw carrot. ‘You know? Don’t get me wrong I love Sesame Street. It is a great programme. But what does it do? Two things. It teaches kids their ABCs, and reminds them to be decent people.
Just two things.
‘On LazyTown, on the other hand sure, we do the ABCs, we teach the kids to be nice to each other. But,’ he says, counting on his fingers, ‘we also three! get kids fit and active, we get them four! - eating healthily. By comparison, Sesame Street, a couple of puppets ‘ he shrugs. ‘Easy.’ As if to prove how much more he has taken on than the lightweight Street, Scheving points up at the ceiling. ‘I built that,’ he says, quite casually. ‘I physically built that ceiling. I built a lot of the walls in this studio. Well, it is not difficult for me,’ he qualifies. ‘I built my own house from scratch.’
Scheving, as one might expect from an actor, writer and director who takes it upon himself to build his own roofs by hand, is in the super-hero business. In LazyTown he plays Sportacus - a high-jumping paragon of fitness and positivity, who lives in a spaceship, and is on a mission to save the inhabitants of LazyTown from junk food and indolence.
In the chat room on mumsnet.com, the ladies recently held a conversation about ‘crush-worthy’ children’s TV characters. Possibly due to Sportacus’s winning combination of tight Lycrawear, extreme athleticism and visible tolerance for children, Scheving cropped up regularly. ‘Mighty fine arse,’ ‘Definitely worth one,’ and ‘Married to some lucky cow,’ were some of the more printable comments.
Alas for the hormones of the lovesick mothers of mumsnet, Scheving also turns out to be very charming and droll company as he tours us around his studios. Throughout the morning, children turn up on set - competition winners; staff offspring; my own, overawed small girls - and Scheving is almost movingly good with them: dropping straight down to their level, asking questions, distributing gifts, and encouraging a life-long daily consumption of apples - or ‘sports candy’, as it is referred to on the show.
And additionally, on the matter of his attractiveness, he is also - and usefully - a millionaire.
Still, he works hard for the money. As creator, writer, director and star of the show, Scheving creates LazyTown from start to finish in this one building, in the middle of the Icelandic tundra.
Outside, the view is of a desolate moonscape. Inside, it’s a riot of colour and ludicrous props, including a giant apple tree and a pink racing car with silver wheels. All the technical wizardry is done on-set. The show’s blend of real-life action, puppetry and CGI is so technologically advanced that the film-making industry at large is agog.
‘We met someone from Hanna-Barbera, who told us that their lot came to a complete standstill the first time LazyTown was aired in the US,’ Scheving says. ‘They were all standing around the TVs, going "How are they doing this? What is this?"’ The show’s computer graphics are so advanced that Scheving had to commission a unique, 70-terabyte processing unit, which is kept in an air-conditioned bunker lest it burst into flame. This is more processing power than exists in the rest of Iceland.
‘LazyTown is the most expensive children’s show in the world,’ Scheving says simply. ‘It’s $1 million per episode.’ Last week, Quentin Tarantino came down on to the set seeking inspiration and technical research for his next, secret, project. It is hard to imagine the man behind Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill coming down on to the set of Fifi & the Flowertots. Not without a machine-gun, anyway.
Sixteen years ago, Scheving was the European Aerobics Champion two times running, and ran a health club in Reykjavík. As a man with both a great arse and a nice line in one-liners, Scheving found himself in great demand giving lectures on healthy living across the world. But time after time, while Scheving delivered his impassioned speeches on healthy living to his delegates, the Q&A sessions afterwards invariably centred on the same topic.
‘They would all be saying, this is all very well for me, the adult but what about my children? What should they be eating? How do I keep them fit?
How much exercise is good for them every day?’ Not a man to let the grass grow under his feet, Scheving decided that the best way to address this lack of information was to go straight to the kids themselves, and tell them in a way they found appealing. ‘After all, this information was most important to them, really.’ He started work on the idea of a LazyTown TV series in 1999 - something vivid and hyper-real, that would attract children’s eyes, but that would be innovative in terms of narrative, character and motivation.
‘It’s all about action, and excitement,’ Scheving says, still pacing restlessly. ‘This is a show that makes kids want to get up and do something RIGHT NOW! Copy Sportacus! Get energy from eating sports candy! Do Stephanie’s dance! Sing!’ Once Scheving had launched the series, he was able to use the show’s increasingly high profile to push a couple of his pet projects. One of these was the Energy Book. Distributed free by the Government to every child in Iceland in 2004, the Energy Book split the whole country into four ‘teams’ of children, and pitted them against each other in a month-long tournament of healthy eating and sporting contests. In one month, sales of fruit and vegetables rose by 22 per cent, and it was announced that childhood obesity in Iceland had dropped by 16 per cent.
In the same year, Scheving also launched free of charge - the LazyTown
Economy: encouraging children to save their pocket money. Every time they made a savings deposit, they were issued with LazyTown Vouchers, that entitled them to free fruit and vegetables, and free sports lessons. The Icelandic Prime Minister, on being asked why there had been such a sharp drop in child obesity that year, said, simply, ‘LazyTown.’ ‘You can ring anyone in the phonebook,’ Scheving says, pointing at the Icelandic phonebook, proudly, ‘And ask them if it’s working, and they will say yes.’
Of course, Scheving knows that launching a scheme such as this in, say, the US, would be virtually impossible. This is why he invests so much faith in his forthcoming LazyTown merchandise - LazyTown bottled water, LazyTown activity games, LazyTown vitamins, LazyTown shoes, ‘and, eventually, LazyTown healthy snacks, LazyTown restaurants and LazyTown theme parks. We are wondering, will we make snacks for McDonald’s? And we are thinking we should. Because, simply, McDonald’s kids need us more than healthfood kids.’ Throughout this grinding regime, Scheving has managed to hold down a 17-year marriage. I see his wife, Ragnheidur Melsted, walking around the offices at one point. She is head of business affairs at LazyTown, looks like one of the Corrs, and has a dirty twinkle in her eye.
‘You should always sleep with your accountant,’ Scheving says, waving to her fondly. ‘I think my wife would say that I am a lousy husband, but a very good father,’ he adds, ruefully munching on a foot-long piece of cucumber.
For while Scheving works ‘five days a week, 15 hours a day, for 13 months at a time’, on LazyTown - at one point, he shows us his ‘home’, which is a ratty-looking orange couch in the edit suite, where he ‘sleeps fast’ at weekends, he is a committed father to their three children, all under the age of ten.
‘We all camp out in the garden, I put up tents, all the kids in the neighbourhood come over. We have 50 kids in the garden, play with rabbits, have barbecues and play sports,’ he says. ‘We build castles.’ ‘You work a 70-hour week, try to save the world’s children from obesity and then build castles for 50 children at the weekend?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ Scheving says, selecting an apple from the fruit bowl and biting into it.
‘Do you,’ I ask, ‘ever do anything easy?’ ‘No,’ he says, simply. ‘I mean, in many ways I can see how this is a big, big deal. We only produce material that can stand up to scrutiny from a moral as well as artistic point, and that is very, very rare. But really, in other ways’ And here he looks out across his studio, built in the middle of the Icelandic tundra, employing 165 people on the most technologically advanced and morally righteous show on earth.
‘In other ways, it is just a man in a moustache, jumping up and down.’
LazyTown is on Nick Jr every weekend at 9am and 4.30pm. LazyTown Special Edition Album is released on Monday and LazyTown Surprise Santa and Other Stories is out on DVD on November 13
