So ‘Jeff the Chef’ was no more. All those years of nurturing this character and all his friends was changing. We had lived with Jeff for a long time. We had spoken to friends and family many times over the years about how Jeff was one day going to be on TV. But now, it wasn’t going to happen. Don’t get me wrong, the fact that our little show had now found a home was AMAZING! It had finally happened and we were over the moon. But also, in some way, it wasn’t the character that we had come to know and love that was going to get his big break. But then, it’s all made up after all. So the search started for a new name.

I am sure you can imagine how hard that was. Seems like it should be easy, but think of another name that rhymes with Jeff. Go on, try. I know, right. there aren’t any. The closest that we ever got was the name Stef. Which would play well in Scandinavian countries, but in the UK it would seem a bit, odd. Talking of odd, we even played with the idea of changing gender. Not us. The character. If he was going to be called Stef, why not make him female. Stef works well as a female name in the UK. I even did a load of designs. So our chef character was going to be female, the child? could be a boy I guess. And the organic farmer friend was going to be a trendy hipster male type character. Yes, there are drawing for this. Might post them at some point. What was also interesting about the gender thing was that way back when the BBC didn’t want a male. So maybe (even though we were now with Channel5) female would be a good move? All those thoughts and then…. STOP!!!!!!
We were going back on the work we had done for many years. A lot of conversations had been had about the power of the father-daughter single parent setup and it worked well, and we were about to throw it all away for the sake of having a name that rhymes. So if a rhyming name isn’t available, how about a bit of ‘alliteration’. So. A name that starts with a ‘shh’ sound. Ready? Go!

First and obvious one is Sean. but as we all know, that has been used on a certain woolly character. Other possibilities are a number of Biblical names, but that wouldn’t travel well. The next obvious and widely used one is (drum roll) SHANE! So, those lovely people at HoHo took it for test drive. they tested it on focus groups and all that kind of stuff and it was a winner. Not only does it sound good, it is also a name that fits well with the Chennel5 audience. It is a name that they are familiar with and a name that is pretty cool 🙂

So we had it. Shane the Chef. Somehow, right as it was it was still a tricky one to get comfortable with personally. Then, a great little bit of advice from Helen at HoHo. She suggested that I do a search and replace of all files and folders on my computer. That way, when I go to open any folder with stuff to work on it will say SHANE and it will be that and nothing else. Good advice. I guess that opening JEFF folders to work on Shane would be like going through a dead man’s wardrobe 😮 And sure enough, for me, he quickly became the Shane that we now know and love.

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