Balamory was my childhood – the reboot had me blinking back tears 21 years later

I didn’t expect the ‘What’s the story in Balamory?’ title credits to make me emotional… but there I was, blinking back tears over the reboot.

The beloved children’s show returned this week, with many of the same actors playing their rhyming or rhythmically-named characters in 10 new episodes, over two decades after it was last on the BBC.

Balamory is still a blaze of coloured houses and community, with a flotilla of dolphins that skip through the harbourside sea.

Each episode follows a formulaic (in a good way) composition: we start with big-hearted Miss Hoolie (Julie Wilson Nimmo) in the Balamory Nursery, where one of the locals (usually the ever-so muddle-prone PC Plum) pitches up with a problem.

Then it’s time to sing ‘Which Coloured House Are We Going To?’ to discern which Balamorian will be best placed to help. At the end of every episode, Miss Hoolie recaps the whole day via a storybook.

Watching the show again all these years later is like stepping into a warm, familiar embrace. Balamory is charmingly much like I remember from watching as a child.

To prove how low-stakes the whole thing is, the reboot premiere revolves around PC Plum’s (Andrew Agnew) mission to perform his great-grandmother’s song at the Balamory ceilidh. Across the board, the music remains superbly catchy.

When the CBeebies show first aired in the early noughties, it was watched by millions in the UK and abroad. My household was one of them. 

During the summer holidays, the lovely Miss Hoolie was essentially my babysitter. Balamory reruns occupied much of my free time in a way I’m sure my parents were relieved by.

It remains one of the first TV shows I adored, and for someone who now watches and writes about TV for a living, that is no small thing. I have rarely been as excited to speak to anyone as I was to interview the Balamory cast.

I don’t remember many of the storylines (bear in mind, there were hundreds of episodes for my developing mind to take in), but I can still tell you all about the cast of characters. Each hovered between knowing and delightfully daft, so the little’un tuning in could feel one step ahead of the grown-ups.

Returning to the now, I did miss painter and jazz enthusiast Spencer (Rodd Christensen) and Archie the inventor (Miles Jupp), who could turn a yoghurt pot into literally anything and lived in a pink castle I dreamt of moving into. But it wouldn’t be a modern reboot if certain original cast members weren’t missing (sorry, Samantha Jones).

The kids of today have their own iterations of Archie and Spencer: Ava Potts (Danielle Jam) has inherited that pretty awesome pink castle from her dad Archie, while trained vet Dr Ollie (Carl Spencer) has taken over Spencer’s tenure of the citrus-y tones.

It feels rather harsh to be the judge of a show geared towards kids, particularly when so little children’s TV is being commissioned. The Balamory revival comes a month after a BBC report warned of its decline, amid funding pressures to both public and commercial broadcasters.

Against that backdrop, it makes sense why the BBC dug out a classic, and one with an incredibly contemporary message, to try and wrangle the kids away from Cocomelon and Bluey. Plus, who wouldn’t want to return to Balamory?

There’s so little crime that PC Plum spends his days chronically drinking cups of tea. Everyone waves when they pass in the street. If I lived in a house that colour-coordinated with my entire wardrobe, I would be similarly ecstatic about it. 

Each episode instils the belief that we can all get along and help each other, regardless of perceived differences.

It might sound a bit kumbaya, but that’s the point of children’s television. Plus, we have enough of the doom and gloom everywhere else.

All episodes of the Balamory reboot are not available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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