Lazy Town is a children's TV programme originally shown on Nick Jr and now on the BBC. The series originated in the August of 2004 is and still going strong.

The series follows the adventures of the inhabitants of a place called Lazy Town. The protagonist of the series is a young, pink-haired girl called Stephanie (played by Julianna Rose Mauriello). Episode 1 sees Stephanie moving into Lazy Town with her uncle who has been elected as the new mayor of Lazy Town.

The two other key characters in the series are Sportacus (played by Magnus Scheving, who is also the creator of the series)and Robbie Rotten (played by Stefan Karl Steffanson).

Robbie Rotten is an evil genius that lives in an underground lair. It is his mission to make sure that Lazy Town stays lazy. He discourages healthy eating and sport. Rotten is also a master of disguise being able to dress as anything from his extensive wardrobe. Amazingly, no matter how bad the disguise is, the others never recognise him.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is resident superhero Sportacus. Sportacus's mission is the exact reverse or Robbie Rotten's. He promotes sports and healthy eating. He travels around Lazy Town in a large blue airship that is filled with sports equipment and health food or "Sports Candy" as he refers to it. When he takes a bite from an apple he recieves amazing strength. Inversely, if Sportacus ever consumes sugar, he becomes weak and loses all his power. Besides his airship, his most prized possesion is the crystal that is located on a little clasp bearing the number 10 on his chest. This crystal causes the clasp to glow and bleep whenever someone is in trouble. As expected, when Stingy steals it, things go terribly wrong with more and more kittens trapped up trees unable to gain Sportacus's attention.

The remaining characters are all represented with puppets. Ziggy is a candy lover. Pixel is a computer whizz kid, being able to hack anything despite being about 10 years old. Stingy is the selfish one and often gets into trouble due to his personality. Trixxie is the naughty one. Other characters are Mayor Milfford Busybody and his wife Bessie Busybody.

One minor character that is being seen more and more as of lately is the small black and white kitten. This poor creature always ends up being stuck up a tree and it is up to Sportacus to save it. The cats origins and owner are unknown. The kitten appears not to have aged at all throughout the duration of the series. Another observation that can be made from these scenes is that Lazy Town only has one tree. Whenever a character (be it the kitten, a puppet or one of the actors) gets stuck up a tree, it always happens to be the same one.

As you can probably guess, the aim of the series was to promote a healthy lifestyle among young kids.

Each episode follows the same basic elements:

An opening scene involving Sportacus using elaborate moves during his waking up progress (eg, getting out of bed, cleaning teeth, etc.)

The kids play some sort of sport and someone (usually Ziggy) gets in trouble and Sportacus has to rescue them.

Robbie views this all going on through a periscope.

Robbie hatches a plan and puts on a disguise.

Robbie decieves the children into doing wrong while in disguise.

A song is sung for no adequately explored reason.

Sportacus jumps in and puts right Robbie's wrong and unmasks him as the evil genius.

Stephanie sings the "Bing Bang" song which appears in every episode.

The scene cuts to Robbie Rotten who as a result of his plan failing has ended up in some embarassing situation.