Best of SA Weekend - The fairy queen
JEN Watts has created a magic empire out of fairyland.
JEN Watts has created a magic empire out of fairyland.
THE ecstatic toddlers in their petal skirts prance around in a pink haze of joy. They are at The Fairies shop at Modbury for their weekly dose of magic. Each tiny dancer takes her position on a large flower as the head fairy cues the music and leads them through the Fairy Twist - a simple sequence of bob-downs, twists and hand rolls - followed by the signature Jump, Jump Star (slide, slide, wiggle, slide). The songs stick, naggingly, in your head.
The mothers sit outside leafing through magazines as they watch the class on closed circuit TV. Fifty years after the supposed dismantling of gender stereotypes and the rise of women's liberation, little girls are obsessed to the point of madness by all things pretty, girly and pink.
"I like pink," says the woman who gives little girls what they want, the creator of The Fairies, Jen Watts.
In 14 years this Adelaide mother has taken a very conventional idea and transformed it into one of the top five most recognised pre-school brands in Australia. Her inspiration was her own children, and she learned on the job. "A lot of this is not scientific," Watts says. "You know you go and ask kids, what's your favourite colour? Pink. What's your second favourite colour? Purple."
Her pilot concept involved two fairies, Harmony and Rhapsody, one rainbow coloured and the other gold; the idea was good but the colours were wrong and Watts believes in keeping her customers happy. "Little girls like pink and purple, OK, we'll give them pink and purple. Some things are pretty straight," she says.
It takes a certain kind of temperament to create a commercial empire out of nothing and Watts has steel under her blonde rose exterior. Her achievements are all her own. When her first daughter was two and into dressing up, Watts had a moment of inspiration watching The Wiggles dance and sing their way through a half-hour TV show. She is not the first person on the fringes of entertainment to look at The Wiggles and think, 'I could do that.' How hard can it be to act the goat, sing a few songs, put on a coloured outfit and pretend to fall asleep? She is one of a very special few able to translate the idea into action.
"It's not rocket science," she says. "Clearly they've got an amazing setup and great brains and they know what they're doing but I thought, 'it's not going to be that hard'." Watts, who looks like a grown-up version of the pretty girls she caters for, decided she would do what The Wiggles do, only for girls. She created a cast of live characters - animation was too expensive - simple plots and a repertoire of basic songs that lend themselves to repetitive singalongs and energetic dance moves. And children were transported by it.
Today she owns The Fairies brand internationally. Disney, with whom she competes, has Disney Fairies but if you Google "the fairies" you get to Watts before you find Disney's Official Fairy Website. Her television series airs in Australia on the Seven network and Foxtel's Nickelodeon, and is also on Nickelodeon in the UK. This month she launches a round-Australia 40-stop live Fairies tour that stars the popular finalist on So You Think You Can Dance, Rhys Bobridge, as choreographer Elf the Fairy Cake Maker. Bobridge, who will complete the tour before a possible move overseas, cartwheeled his way into an Adelaide audition 11 years ago and was hired on the spot. "The buzz you get from performing for kids is unlike any other," he says.
Watts has also sold hundreds of thousands of DVDs and books and oversees a range of almost universally pink merchandise that includes flashing cups, bed linen, backpacks and bottled fairy water. None of this was achieved with the wave of a magic wand. It all came out of her imagination and she defies anyone to tell her this is not the way Fairyland should be.
At a full dress rehearsal just over a month before the start of the tour, a photographer takes publicity stills while Watts - clearly the most important person in the room - shows the cast what she wants. The Fairies is one of the largest private performing arts employers in the state and this is her show. Her business card, which is fuchsia pink, says it all: Jen Watts Fairy Queen.
"Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are, The Fairies is very much the world according to Jen," she says. "I'm the Fairy Queen, absolutely."
She calls herself a child of the universe. As an aspiring singer and actress, she once sang in pop and rock bands around Adelaide. She says she was good but not great and would never have made it to the top. In the first incarnation of The Fairies she cast herself as Harmony until a review in the UK press which read, "by the straining look of the gold lame, these Aussie fairies have been sinking a few too many tinnies". She sacked herself and can laugh about it.
Since then she has concentrated on writing concepts, skits, and songs. A continuing thread through the series and the show are the Five Fairy Friendship Rules which Watts uses to promote positive behaviour. The rules, all written by Watts, include such pearls as "Be happy giggly and positive" and "A hug a day and your friends will stay". Watts says they are good basic guidelines that world leaders would do well to learn from.
The bubble of undiluted happiness in which The Fairies float reflects Watts's personal dislike of all things bad or unpleasant. After finishing school at St Peter's Girls, she studied journalism but gave it away because she balked at having to write bad news. "I have a love of nice things," she says. "I don't go and watch movies if I know they have an unhappy ending." If Watts had her way, we would all bleed rainbows.
Last year she went on holiday and read a book that was going well until the lead character died and someone went to jail. She lay awake that night unable to sleep until she had reworked the ending so it fitted her view of how the world should be. She won't risk going to a film unless she knows it ends well and nobody dies.
This spirit of perfect happiness is the hallmark of The Fairies. There are no evil stepmothers or poisoned apples and nothing nasty happens. "I wanted no antagonists at all," she says. "In my world there doesn't need to be nastiness, there's enough of that when they get older. I believe their world should just be filled with magic and glitter and beauty."
Her shows contain familiar skits and signature tunes and there are oblique Enid Blyton references - a Magical Mystery Tree rather than The Magical Faraway Tree. The storylines revolve around cheekiness and mischief, nothing darker. "The young ones might do something wrong; they might take something and have to learn from it," she says. "There is no bad witch."
Real life is not so kind. In the early days when Watts was first fired with enthusiasm, she put down her ideas for a pilot and hawked it to key people in the South Australian television industry who told her she had no hope of succeeding. According to Watts this was because she was not in the industry, because she wanted to keep the copyright and because she was a woman. She cried for 24 hours then got over it. "I rebound well which is good because I've had so many knocks," she says. "It's unbelievable. They continue now, I'm slightly better."
She raised enough finance to make a five-minute pilot which got her an advance from what was then Polygram Video. Then she raised seed money from investors. She sold 20,000 DVDs but struggled to sell cold a concept that was not backed by a TV deal. When the Polygram deal fell through, The Fairies was picked up by ABC for Kids, the commercial arm of the ABC, which sold the books and DVDs while ABC television continued to refuse to show. In 2005, she pitched to Channel 7. They rang her and asked for 26 half hours of television to be completed within nine months.
"I had no scripts, no set and no music. Nothing," says Watts. She delivered and later that year, the first of three series went to air. As a result, DVD sales and merchandise grew and so far Watts has made 78 half hours of television, sold 420,000 DVDs, 600,000 Fairy books and 90,000 colour and activity albums. The Fairies used to perform occasional concerts at Norwood Town Hall which would routinely sell out and last year they went on their first 12-week national tour. This month's tour, featuring songs from the past decade, will take in 40 locations, including regional centres.
She is poised on the brink of the big time but is not there yet. The potential of an entertainment concept aimed at an audience that renews itself every three or four years is massive and her vision is to climb to the top. Her mission statement is to be "the best pre-school entertainment for girls in the world, bar none". "I've always thought big, there's no reason to think small," she says. But growth has been incremental. The television series still lacks the breakthrough international exposure needed for Wiggles-style mega success and her growth is constrained by high production costs and the low returns from Australian children's TV.
She has had three rounds of fundraising which raised $6 million, including $2.6 million from private investors. They have still not recouped their investment. "It's quite funny; people think we are absolutely rolling in the cash. They look around us and think I must be one of the wealthiest women in Adelaide," she says. "To be honest we're still putting back."
On a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the best in the world, Watts puts her achievements so far at about one. For every step forward, there is a setback. Mass market outlets like Target and Kmart have been hard to get into and a range of Fairies clothing at Target sold well, then was dropped. "The Disney range came in after that, Disney Fairies," she says. "It's tough competing against someone so big."
But Watts has maintained faith in the long-term viability of her product because she is convinced fairies will always be the favourites of little girls. She says there is still prejudice in the industry against her and her product, and that it defies belief that ABC TV has not picked her up when their commercial arm supports and makes money out of her. Is it snobbery?
"I don't really want to say but I believe it's to do with personality - mine. That's only a gut instinct because I can't see why they would take other properties over mine," she says. Watts says she is looked down on even by those who do well by her, namely her publisher HarperCollins. At this year's Adelaide Writers' Week her publishers were in town promoting her Fairies books, but failed to contact her. "They're great but it was like, OK, I'm not taken seriously doing that either," she says. HarperCollins says it was an oversight and the book series is one of the key properties on the children's list. "We are delighted to be the publisher of The Fairies - little girls absolutely adore the characters. We publish four fabulously pink Fairies titles each year," says head of publishing Brigitta Doyle.
It has to be said there is something of a question mark over the underlying message about female capability that the endlessly smiling, waving Fairies send out. The television shows are technically gender neutral with Barnaby, Wizzy the Wizard and Elf the Fairy Cake Maker providing balancing male figures in accordance with Australian Broadcasting Authority guidelines. But they are pitched at pre-school girls and any boys who are hooked usually drop the habit once they discover their embarrassing mistake.
The programs make no claims to be educational. Watts argues that is already catered for by programs like Playschool and Sesame Street. She is giving little girls what they want, not what they need.
But not everyone supports entertainment that perpetuates the idea of the girl child as a fairy princess. University of South Australia adjunct associate professor Dale Bagshaw says pre-school is a formative time and little girls are not well-served by such a narrow portrayal of compliant girlhood. She would like Watts to do more than just tap into conventional femininity by broadening her message about what it can be to be female. "It is feeding into that princess mentality which I think is a dangerous construct for women in the long run," she says. "It certainly hasn't served them well as they have got older or been divorced or whatever and suddenly found they were on the scrapheap and no longer a princess."
Balance may be the answer. Jacqui Tottman, who manages Windmill, which specialises in educational toys, says her Adelaide shop sells fairy wings, tiaras, face paint and wands alongside toys that actively encourage childhood development. Her view is that the fariy obsession is fading. Tottman says. "The main thing is to have them exposed to other options as well."
Watts might look like an adult version of her princess audience but she is no shrinking violet. She married Mark, a British mechanic who was in Adelaide as spares manager with Benetton during the Formula One Grand Prix and lived in the UK for five years before having her first child and delivering him an ultimatum about returning home. "Having a child in England on your own with no family support is very tough and I had a very willing and able family network here. So I said to him, sorry, five years is up. If you want to come with me, that's great. If not, happy racing. He came."
She was doing public relations work for Faulding when she had her son, Harry. She gave birth on a Tuesday and returned to work the following Monday, taking Harry in a capsule. After risking everything to start The Fairies, she had a third child, a daughter, Lucy, and sent out emails from her hospital bed the night she was born. "I wrote a song last year (to Lucy) called Princess Perfect. She is just the easiest child," says Watts. "I think the other two are a bit dark because I haven't written one about them yet."
At weekends on her family property at Mt Jagged, between Mt Compass and Victor Harbour, Watts cuts wood with a chainsaw and shoots vermin. "I'm not a girly girl by any stretch of the imagination," she says. "I shoot foxes if I have to because they took five of my chooks recently. I hate them. They are vile animals."
Last year, when the third series of The Fairies was in production, Watts fell foul of the actors' union over the employment contracts she issued to her fairies, elf and wizard. The problem involved their entitlement to residual payments linked to the sale of DVDs and any subsequent sale of the series overseas. When the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance intervened, Watts shut down production for a couple of months and refused to negotiate. Watts says it was a difficult time and she spent $100,000 in legal fees. An agreement was finally reached which gave the actors some "use fees" and production resumed. The final series and tours have proceeded more smoothly.
Having not quite achieved world domination on a scale to rival The Wiggles, Watts in the past year has set out on the potentially lucrative path of retail franchising, with her goal being 50 shops around Australia in three years - on top of those she owns in Norwood and Modbury, and franchises in Perth and Launceston - before expanding internationally.
Her most immediate ambition, however, is to relieve her family of the financial pressure that has been the backdrop to their lives for almost 14 years. She wants the financial freedom to be able to pay the school fees without having to rob Peter to pay Paul. "Mark and I have put everything into The Fairies for nearly 14 years," she says. "We've mortgaged everything to the hilt. We've mortgaged our children, we've sold off everything we can. Financial freedom is a very big goal."
In person she is closer than she realises to the perfect role model for her thousands of Fairies fans, a woman who decides what she wants and is capable of going after it. Her ambition is to afford nice things for her family but she is not seeking to cloak herself in the riches of a fairy queen. "I'm not into diamonds and things like that, it doesn't go with the chainsaw," she says. "I'd like a better chainsaw, and a tractor that I could drive."