5 Singapore Childhood TV Shows We All Watched After School

Groom My Room and Sketch: the ones that made you jealous

Groom My Room was a bedroom makeover show for kids aged 7 to 13, given a budget and a deadline. Eleven seasons, 103 episodes, starting on Kids Central in 2005, then okto, then Channel 5. It went onto meWatch on 15 July 2018 and all eleven seasons are there.

Nobody watched it for the design. You watched it because some kid your age got a themed room and you had a bunk bed and a study table. Still stings a bit.

Sketch was the drawing show, and the honest childhood memory attached to it is trying to draw something off the screen and failing. A PSP, usually. If you want more of this specific flavour of ache, we have void deck games and the online games we played as kids.

Xi Yang Yang, Mat Yoyo and Art Factory

Xi Yang Yang is 喜羊羊, and yes it has an English name: Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. Most people here never used it once. Xi Yang Yang, Mei Yang Yang, Lan Yang Yang was the whole roll call and nobody needed a translation.

Mat Yoyo was the longest-running local children's series of the 1980s, with Yoyo and Yaya in the mornings. It came back in 2012 as Mat Yoyo: The New Generation, running in English, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, Indonesian and Filipino across six Mediacorp channels at once, which is a genuinely strange thing to have pulled off. So whichever language you watched it in, you were not imagining it.

Art Factory was the craft show, and it is the one adults defend hardest. Two hosts, a lot of glue, and the belief that you could make something good out of a toilet roll. Nobody's turned out like the one on TV either.

FAQs

Can I still watch Groom My Room?

Yes. All 11 seasons are on meWatch, added on 15 July 2018. It ran on Kids Central, then okto, then Channel 5.

What is Xi Yang Yang's English name?

Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf. It is a Chinese animated series, not a Singaporean one, though it aired here constantly.

What channel was Mat Yoyo on?

It began as a Mediacorp children's series in the 1980s and was revived in 2012 as Mat Yoyo: The New Generation, broadcast in six languages across six Mediacorp channels including okto, Suria, Channel 8 and Vasantham.

What was Kids Central?

Mediacorp's children's television channel, the home of most of these shows before the programming moved to okto.