It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…or is it? After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing seemed perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children across the former empire, with Jim Henson’s Muppet creations envisioned as ideal ambassadors for Western values, an idea championed in Congress by then-senator Joe Biden. After all, the show had been running for almost 25 years in the US and already had over a dozen international co-productions, including in Brazil, Germany and Israel. But no one anticipated just how challenging and dangerous this would prove to be. In 1992 Natasha Lance Rogoff, who had previously produced Mexico’s Plaza Sesamo in Mexico and covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow summit for NBC’s Tom Brokaw, was tasked with establishing the Russian co-production Ulitsa Sezam. With a sharp wit and compassion for her colleagues, in Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia she observes how cultural clashes coloured nearly every aspect of the production and reflects on the complicated relationship between the Russian people and the West that continues to this day. Now a Harvard Associate, Natasha joins us in London to discuss the highs and lows of a show that ultimately reached millions of families in Russia, Ukraine and beyond. In conversation with journalist Anne McElvoy.