Maddie + Triggs: It’s Amazing What You Hear When You Take The Time To Listen
In an article written for the Children’s Media Yearbook 2025. Colm Tobin, Managing Director, Turnip + Duck describes the creative development for “Maddie and Triggs”
I should start by saying this: I’m probably not the guy you’d pick to make a groundbreaking, values driven, inclusive preschool series. At least, I wouldn’t be the obvious choice.
Back in the late 90s and early 00s, I was cutting my creative teeth making deeply silly, often offensive satirical cartoons with my childhood collaborator Aidan O’Donovan and some other college friends. Inspired by The Day Today, Brass Eye, and with a visual palette owing a lot to Terry Gilliam’s early Python work, we prided ourselves on equal-opportunity offending. No sacred cows. No holding back. No regrets… well, actually loads of regrets, but that’s another story.
We made web cartoons featuring Irish politicians in jacuzzies with Joseph Stalin and Margaret Thatcher. We featured the dead heroes of the 1916 Rising careering around Dublin in an A-Team van. Our aesthetic was part South Park, part student house share, with a generous side serving of Buckfast. It was crass, chaotic and, by some miracle, it caught on and launched our careers in animation – quite a feat for two guys who had only ever successfully drawn one thing: the dole.
So how did I end up here, co-creating a joyful animated musical preschool series for CBeebies and RTÉjr? Honestly, I’m still not entirely sure. But if I had to put a pin in it, I’d say that sometimes a project chooses you. And when it does, your only job is to try not to mess it up.
Maddie + Triggs didn’t start with a pitch deck or a style bible, as was the case on many of our previous shows. It started with sound. In 2020, while the world was busy baking banana bread, we built a 15-episode podcast in our attics. It was a small, DIY labour of love featuring a seven-year-old girl named Maddie who happened to be vision-impaired, her adorable labradoodle Triggs, and their magical, musical adventures in the town of Higgledy-Piggledy.
It was playful, funny, and entirely audio-led – a throwback to the kind of storytelling Aidan and I had grown up making, long before anyone handed us a budget or a deadline. It gave us the chance to take up our musical instruments again and make some tunes with a small team of likeminded collaborators. We did most of the voices ourselves. It was multitasking gone mad.
What made this project different was our mission:
If two children, one sighted and one vision-impaired, sit down to watch the show, neither should have a lesser experience.
That idea came from a chance comment by our friend Óran O’Neill at RTÉ, who had lost his sight as an adult and helped us create the audio description on our previous series Critters TV. He mentioned that Critters worked surprisingly well in audio because the humour was so dialogue-led. But we had never really considered a vision-impaired audience. In fact, the audio description for that show was done as an afterthought, a contractual obligation with our funders.
That got us thinking – what if we started there? What if sound wasn’t an afterthought, as it is so often in animation? What if it became the central focus of our development? And what if we considered a vision-impaired audience from the very beginning?
© Turnip + Duck
We realised pretty quickly that making a show with a vision-impaired lead character meant we had a responsibility. Both Aidan and I aren’t vision-impaired. This is not our story to tell. And we didn’t want to charge into this territory with the clumsy confidence of two middle-aged white knights on a diversity side quest. So we didn’t.
Instead, we took a leaf from Maddie’s book and started to, well, listen. We partnered with Vision Ireland and met with blind and vision-impaired children and their families. One moment that stayed with us was hearing how rarely these kids saw (heard!) themselves reflected on-screen – and when they did, it was often only in the context of their disability, or in a sad, issue-led storyline. What they wanted was joy. Fun. Characters who just happened to be like them, but who were busy having adventures, telling jokes, singing songs.
We worked with our partners Angel Eyes in Belfast, experiencing their EmpathEyes VR simulator to better understand different types of sight loss. They were hugely supportive as we developed the show’s unique aesthetic, rooted in Universal Design principles. Our animation partners at Sun & Moon in Bristol brought that vision to life with incredible care and craft. We learned that by making something more accessible for one audience, you end up making something better and more beautiful for everyone.
Our first hire on the series was a digital access and accessibility consultant, Shelley Boden, who helped us build inclusion into our production from day one, on-screen and off. With Shelley’s help, we brought blind and vision-impaired talent into the team, and we launched the Listen Hear programme, training up ten new vision-impaired writers over the course of the production. Four of them will earn their first full writing credits on Maddie + Triggs, including our audio description lead Óran O’Neill, which is a lovely full circle. All the lyrics on the show are written by Dena Diamond, a blind comedy writer from the US, who works closely with our writers and musical director so the music and stories are fully intertwined.
From the start, it felt like there was a gentle breeze behind this project, pushing us toward brilliant collaborators and generous supporters. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. This kind of work takes time. It takes funding. It takes real coordination across organisations that don’t always move at the same pace. And when you’re also trying to keep a small business afloat in a challenging industry, it can be extremely tough. But the work is worth it. And we feel like we are only scratching the surface. We’re committed to deepening and expanding this ethos in future series of Maddie + Triggs, and beyond.
Now, this isn’t to say we’ve abandoned all nonsense at Turnip + Duck. We absolutely reserve the right to make rude, scatological silliness just for the joy of it. But Maddie + Triggs has changed us. It’s shown us that accessibility and inclusion aren’t niche concerns. They’re not boxes to tick. They’re creative engines.
They make for better storytelling. Happier teams. Stronger work. And, maybe unexpectedly, they make you a better person along the way.
Maddie and Triggs mix up a ‘bonkers cake’! © Turnip + Duck
We’ve seen the impact of this show – not just on kids, but on the grown-ups making it. Writers, animators, producers, musicians – all coming away with a deeper understanding of difference, and a greater appreciation of how sound, story and representation can sing in harmony.
In a world where some forces are weaponizing language against DEI or EDI policies, it’s never been more important to double down on shared values in kids’ content. Seriously, if we can do it, anybody can. As Maddie says:
“It’s amazing what you hear when you take the time to listen.”
It really is.
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