A black British family wrote stories to reflect their lives. Now they're on TV

A black British family has created a children's television show for the new Sky Kids channel, despite having no previous experience or training in TV production.

- Dalya Alberge

Cynthia and Anthony Deluola, of Ghanaian and Nigerian heritage, live in London and work in child safeguarding and as an airline pilot respectively. To their astonishment, they impressed Sky's producers with books that they had self-published and an animated cartoon they had made in their spare time because their daughter Elise, as a black child growing up in the UK, had been unable to find characters just like herself in print and on screen.

Elise, now nine, had attended a book day celebration at school in which the children dressed up in costumes based on favourite characters from children's stories. She wore a Ghanaian costume - only to feel out of place among her classmates' fairytale princesses and wizards.

Cynthia Deluola said: "At the time, there were not a lot of books that represented black children or diversity. Even the cartoons. So we thought, 'okay, she likes to wear traditional African outfits, she has plenty, she could wear an African dress'. She loved it.