Horrible Histories: 5 brilliant songs

The cast and crew of CBBC's best show explain how they turn musty old history into minor pop classics.

It's no secret that many alleged "grown-ups" are supplementing their haphazard history educations with CBBC's Horrible Histories, back for its fifth series with lovely, daft input from The League of Gentlemen. Tiny, mighty Sarah Hadland from Miranda and funny, clever Alice Lowe, writer of Sightseers are regular faces too. To adult eyes, Horrible Histories has the distinct feel of a group of bright, young, erudite, writery-actory sparks having a tremendously good time. One that they probably wouldn't be permitted to have anywhere else on telly.

Kids love them as they are the most peculiar sort of grown-ups. The sort of wonky uncles and aunties who turn up to tea with mild hangovers, scant regard for etiquette and a host of stories about idiot highway men, Second World War bat bombs (bombs attached to bats, prone to exploding before they left the American base) and an imaginary CD compilation called Now That's What I Call Spartan Warrior Music.

There's something about the Horrible Histories gang I find terrifically, stupidly, funny. They're the best bits of Monty Python, Roald Dahl, Tiswas, BBC2's The Tudors and The Young Ones all shoved into a bin and bashed with a stick. "Divorced, beheaded and Died! Divorced, Beheaded, Survived!" is the song that carousels in my mind whenever anyone mentions Henry VIII. Horrible Histories drummed the order of Henry's wives and their fates into my mind where A-level cramming failed forlornly. If only Mathew Baynton and Ben Willbond had shown up at my school in the Nineties and sung a few songs about the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, I could have a proper job now. Not just writing down stuff I think, drinking Earl Grey and taking Yodel deliveries in for neighbours.

The award-winning Horrible Histories has returned for a triumphant fifth series, putting its distinct comic twist upon epochs long gone, plus a few that are, disconcertingly, more recent.

Included among the Slimy Stuarts, Smashing Saxons and Vile Victorians was the Troublesome Twentieth Century, featuring Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 weight-loss programme from 1969 - no willpower was required, but you did need a 36-storey-high space rocket to get you to the Moon, where minimal gravity reduced your weight by 82%.

I'm not sure how I feel about Horrible Histories catching up with my own era - who knows, the next step could involve my featuring in the show's Stupid Deaths slot - but I am definitely a big fan of the show.

Quite apart from being very funny, constantly inventive and subliminally educational, it also has the courage to tackle potentially controversial events head on. Re-imagining Rosa Parks' celebrated civil rights protest as a soul number explained a complex issue in a clever, concise and accessible way without trivialising it.

"Gory stories we do that - and your host's a talking rat!" The return of the best thing on telly, this week featuring Smashing Saxons (and their superhero-style Gods), Vile Victorians, and Gorgeous Georgians. But the stand-out highlight is Dominique Moore as civil rights icon Rosa Parks, singing a frankly brilliant Motown-style number called I Sat On The Bus: "I made a stand in my home town of Montgomery, Alabama/Refused to stand/For a white man/So they put me in the slammer"

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