LADYBIRD Books and BBC radio performance poet Murray Lachlan Young will host a storytelling extravaganza at City Screen, York, on Thursday morning.

Doors will open at 10.30am for the 11am story-time for under-fives: a Ladybird Live! early-reading initiative that will be a mixture of poetry, stand-up comedy, storytelling and a touch of panto.

Lachlan Young will introduce four storytelling films featuring actress Liza Tarbuck, punk princess, actress and presenter Toyah Wilcox, Smack The Pony star Sally Phillips and children’s television presenter Andy Day. Tarbuck will read Goldilocks and The Three Bears; Wilcox, Little Red Riding Hood; Phillips, The Gingerbread Man; and Day, The Three Little Pigs.

This event will complement City Screen’s regular Kids’ Club activities, held each Saturday morning. Its aim is to provide a “positive route to showing very young children that books and reading are great fun”, while encouraging them to dance, go up on stage, complete easy rhymes and join in the animal noises in an enlightening hour of merriment and mayhem.

York bookseller Bubbles of Gillygate will have a stall at the Coney Street cinema to enable parents to peruse a range of Ladybird titles.

Kids’ Club co-ordinator Adam Greenwood says: “Children who come dressed up as a ladybird stand a chance of winning a superb prize. The best costume wins £100 worth of Ladybird books.”

Tickets cost £3 on 0871 902 5726 or online at picturehouses.co.uk/cinema