Tales by Moonlight (partially found Nigerian children's storytelling TV series; 1984-2002, 2013, 2020-2022)

Title card.

Status: Partially found

Tales by Moonlight was a Nigerian children's storytelling series that aired on Sundays at 6:30 on all NTA stations from 1984 to 2002, later being revived in 2013 and from 2020 to 2022. It was created by former Director of Programmes at NTA Victoria Ezeokoli in 1984 in order to rival the popularity of Sesame Street and preserve African cultural traditions by re-enacting telling folktales.

The show started to decline in popularity in the 1990s, and by mid-2002, no new editions of the series were produced, although it continued to air.

Format

Each episode lasted for 30 minutes and featured a woman named Nkem Oselloka-Orakwue^[1] or later Jimmy Solanke narrating different folktales to a group of children seated beneath a tree at night. The folktales had moral lessons, quite unlike children's television series from the Western world. They encouraged traits such as honesty, kindness, respecting parents and elders, empathy, and cooperation, and discouraged traits such as lying, cheating, wickedness, cruelty, disobedience, and greed.

It started with the following dialogue:

Aunty: Story, Story
Children: Story
Aunty: Once Upon a Time
Children: Time, Time

At the end of each episode, the children shared different lessons learned from the stories, as well as asking and answering questions.

Availability

Despite the series' immense popularity on children and the importance of the moral lessons, very few efforts have been made to archive episodes of Tales by Moonlight.^[2] In 2012, a YouTube user named Remi Adedokun uploaded 4 clips of the series.

The series' immense popularity led to a revival of it airing on NTA on Fridays in 2013^[3]^[4], but no episodes from the 2013 revival have been archived. Between 2020 and 2022, a few more episodes were posted online. However, it is unknown if any episodes of the 2020 revival other than the ones posted exist.