Shaun the Sheep may not have been the star of the Wallace and Grmit films but he now has aseries all of his own. Steve Pratt takes a woolly leap through the famous sheep of stage and screen.

For some of us, the real star of Aardman Animation's award-winning short film A Close Shave wasn't Wallace or even Gromit but another silent star - Shaun the Sheep.

There was no role for him in Wallace And Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit but the scene-stealing ovine's memory was kept alive as he was seen all over town, as a Shaun-shaped back pack.

Now the bleat goes on as Shaun gets his own series called, with a certain inevitability you may feel, Shaun The Sheep. It's the first series produced by Aardman specifically for children, although their past successes have attracted a big young audience as well as young-at-heart adults.

The BBC will screen two episodes daily Monday to Friday from March 5, with the ten episodes repeated at the weekend on CBBC.

The same people who worked on Curse Of The Were-Rabbit are behind the 40-episode series. Many also worked on Aardman's other feature film, Chicken Run. Richard Golesszowski, long-time 'Aard', directed the series just as he directed the Creature Comforts ITV series before it.

Countryside chaos is guaranteed as Shaun, never one to follow the flock, shows that he's the best sheep baa none. He leads his flock into all sorts of scrapes and scraps, running rings round sheepdog Bitzer when the Farmer's back is turned.

The series introduces a farmyard-full of new characters to assist Shaun including the Naughty Pigs, Timmy the baby lamb and the enormous Shirley, a sheep who eats anything and everything.

Early episodes show Shaun using a stray cabbage in a grudge football match and staging a commando raid on the Farmer's house to steal hot water from his bathroom.

Shaun isn't the first sheep to pull the wool over our eyes and make a name for himself on the screen, both big and small.

Nobby the Sheep was a regular on the Tyne Tees-produced Ghost Train, a Saturday morning children's show in the early 1990s. Nobby was a cool bundle of wool with his leather jacket and mohican haircut.

He was so popular that he joined Jenny Powell and, briefly, Ant and Dec on Ghost Train successor Gimme 5.

Aussie soap Neighbours has featured many well-remembered characters - Scott, Charlene, Harold, Madge and, of course, Casserole the sheep.

Cassie was brought home by young Billy Kennedy from his paper round and lived in the back garden of number 28. Susan and Karl were there to comfort the creature as it headed for the great sheep cemetery in the sky.

In the 1970s, Larry the Lamb enjoyed misadventures in Toytown in an ITV puppet animation series. Then Lamb Chop was on the entertainment menu when comedienne and ventriloquist Shari Lewis was appearing.

The sock puppet first appeared with her on the US children's morning TV show Captain Kangaroo. In 1992, Lamb Chop and Shari began their own PBS children's show, Lamb Chop's Play-Along, an Emmy Award winner for five consecutive years.

The Baaas was a Welsh language children's TV show about a family of multi-cultural opera-singing sheep. It was shown on S4C, the Welsh equivalent of C4.

Producer Nia Ceidiog described the Baaas as "a funny, large and larger than life family who live life to the full". She added, "They walk and talk, sing and dance, bicker and bond like humans but their cuddly fleeces and bleating laughter tell you they're a family of multi-racial sheep".

Some sheep find fame for the way they look. A New Zealand sheep that managed to evade the shearers finally got a haircut live on national TV.

Shrek, the Merino sheep, roamed around South Island for six years before being rounded up. The giant fleece - weighing 60lb and enough to make 20 large men's suits - was auctioned for children's medical charities.

As for clean-cut Shrek's future, he was too old to be sold for mutton but was recruited to promote New Zealand's wool trade.

Not all sheep appearances are as jolly as Shaun's. The Tribecca Film Festival in New York showed a movie called 37 Uses For A Dead Sheep last year.

It was revealed as a documentary about the plight of a tribe of nomadic people forced to migrate across Central Asia. The title was actually a metaphor for the loss of the culture of the Pamir Kirghiz, although one of their uses for a dead sheep is playing a type of horse polo with a sheep's carcass. Best not let Shaun hear about such goings-on.

As for the 1970s US TV series called Baa Baa Black Sheep, this had nothing whatsoever to do with sheep. It was based on the Second World War experiences of a US marine corps aviator and his Black Sheep Squadron.

* Shaun The Sheep begins on BBC1 on March 5.