This autumn Andy Davenport, the creative powerhouse behind “In the Night Garden” and “Teletubbies”, is launching a new TV series on CBeebies, with Scholastic to publish a spin-off tie-in book.

“Moon and Me”, aimed at a pre-school audience, is about a group of toys who come alive at night. Davenport told The Bookseller he was inspired by 20th-century books about the lives of toys in toy houses, such as those written by Rumer Godden.

“It struck me that there isn’t a contemporary equivalent, even though those books are still in print and still popular,” he said. The only modern equivalent is “Toy Story”, but the world of “Moon and Me” is smaller and more intricate than the Pixar franchise, which juxtaposes its characters with the outside world, Davenport added.

“Moon and Me” is about a magical doll called Pepi Nana, the only toy who wakes up at night in the toy house. The others stay sleeping where their child owner has placed them, so Pepi Nana, in her loneliness, decides to write to the Moon. Her letter is received by Moon Baby, who comes down for tea and wakes up the other toys. They go off and have adventures, and at the end of every episode they sing a song and go back to bed, apart from Moon Baby, who goes back home.

The programme was made using two production methods, puppetry and stop motion, which was “complicated” but intentional, said Davenport. “These are characters from different worlds, so it made sense to me. The toys from the house were brought to life by puppetry and we tried to go as close as possible to the scale of toys, so very small. You really feel like you are in a toy house. For Moon Baby we used stop motion, which gives him a feeling of being real.”

The Moon and Me book; Andy Davenport pictured on the set of “Moon and Me”

The TV show has been four years in the making and very early on Davenport worked with Sheffield University to create a toy house rigged with cameras and microphones, so he could observe children at play. “I wanted to do a contemporary take on the ‘toys coming to life story’, so it is gender non-specific, for example. We watched the children play and the life of the toys they played with, and from that I got a sense of where we would start,” he said. Davenport wrote the scripts, co-produced the show through his company Foundling Bird (in partnership with content production company Sutikki), wrote all the music and created a book, Moon and Me: The Little Seed, which will be published by Scholastic.

Davenport is aware how unusual it is for a publisher to release a book before a property has proven itself on the market, with most opting to “hire new writers when publishing books associated with TV shows”. But he says he “likes to see it in a different way”, pointing out that he wrote the majority of the books about “In the Night Garden”, and adding: “I see the act of authorship as being across mediums, so I suppose I’m more like a traditional author in that way. It would be strange to let anyone else [write the books].”

In any case, the idea of books and the TV show are interconnected because the programme emphasises reading all the way through, with books and reading shown throughout the series, he added.

The TV programme will be screened by the BBC in November as part of CBeebies’ “Go to Bed” programming, and the book will be released on 1st November (hardback, £10.99). Davenport has been commissioned to create 50 episodes, and said it is up to the broadcaster whether there will be any more. He also hopes there will be further tie-in books.

“When you write a book, you have a different palette to play with because you portray the world in words first, whereas with TV you start with a picture,” he said. “Right now I’m focusing on what’s important: the audience and whether they like it. Hopefully parents enjoy it too.”

Scholastic will publish Andrew Davenport’s Moon and Me: The Little Seed on 1st November in hardback, priced at £10.99.