TRUE.     Thurston's Fair was, and is, a real business, and all the trucks and workers seen in the story are really from the fair. Bert Thurston really is the name of the bloke who runs it, though he was played by an actor in the story. Bert himself was massively co-operative with the filming, letting the crew use his power supplies as well as his whole fairground. The story was filmed with the fair set up in a field in Bedford, with real people using it during the evening then the Look and Read crew taking over late at night, fiddling with the lights and sticking people up the big wheel and stuff. The merry-go-round used at the end of the story was not in public use - it was erected round the back of the real fair specially for the actors to use!

FALSE!    OK, so obviously the lad's real name wasn't Ozzie and he was an actor - but neither was he actually a lad. He was about 20 years old when they filmed Fair Ground!, but some sort of bone disease or whatever (tactful, huh?) made him look much younger. This made filming the story much easier since there weren't any actual children involved at all, so the restrictive rules about how much work child actors are allowed to do didn't apply, and the actors could take much more responsibility than otherwise.

FALSE!    All the talking and squawking of the parrot came from Percy Edwards, a world famous "animal impersonator" who spent his whole life doing animal noises for radio, TV, films, pop videos and cartoons. There was a real-life (non-talking) parrot on set of course, and it was meant to be carried around by the girl playing Rachel Thurston. Unfortunately she was terrified of the bird and found it very difficult to do scenes with the thing on her shoulder - so if you watch carefully most scenes, especially near the beginning, involve Captain Cutlass perched on a convenient nearby ledge or something. Ozzie also takes charge of the bird quite a bit, because that actor had no problem working with it.

FALSE!    The Fair Ground! story book was illustrated by Martin Salisbury, a genuine artist who's done loads of other kids books too, but that wasn't him introducing the story with Wordy, it was just the actor Wayne Laryea off of Pipkins. The reason they had an actor playing a real, living person who had been involved with the story was to aid attempts at linking the teaching bits with the story bits and stop children getting bored.
It had been clear since the mid-70s to Look and Read's producers that the main problem with the programme's formula was the big jump between exciting story bits that kids wanted to watch, and boring teaching bits that they couldn't be bothered with. This was referred to as the "Urgh Factor", after the groan from viewers everytime the story stopped and Wordy popped up. Two main strategies were used to lessen the Urgh Factor: first, they tried to make the teaching bits active and interesting, which is the whole reason Wordy was invented in the first place, with his messing-about attitude and deliberately bad jokes; And second, they tried to link the teaching bits together with the story, so there wouldn't be such a noticeable gap between them. In the past they'd tried getting characters from the story, and even a story's author, to do the presenting and preserve links, and for Fair Ground! the link was established by having (apparently) the book illustrator do the teaching.

FALSE!    The music was put together by the production team themselves, then vetted by an education consultant. Pretty much all of the song lyrics during Look and Read's "golden age" in the 1970s and 80s, including the theme tunes, were the responsibility of assistant producer Rosanna Hibbert who would spend days and weeks sitting in the production office trying to think up, for instance, Magic E words that rhymed and mad/e sense with or without the e. Which is very tricky indeed! The music was composed by Roger Limb (or occasionally other Radiophonic musicians, depending on the producer), in collaboration with the designer making the animations. The great Mr Griffiths simply came into the Workshop one day and sang what he was given.