A Lament For Children's Television

Riayn, in her blog ‘Dancing with Architecture’, recently posted about children’s books that stand the test of time. Which novels and characters are still going to be published thirty or forty years from now? Will our children still be reading the same books we grew up with? This post got me thinking about quality children’s writing, in books, films and television, meaning you may see a few posts on this broad subject over the next few weeks.

Recently, I’ve been watching a series of programs from last year, ‘Children’s TV on Trial’, covering the history of British children’s television. One point that becomes obvious is a steady decline in the quantity and quality of narrative storytelling for the under-fives.

There’s No Money in Kid’s TV

The reasons for the decline in children’s television programming seem more linked to their value as consumers. Advertisers are not keen to market to an audience without money or the decision-making power to buy their products. This is why a lot of children’s programming, from the '80's onwards, is tied into a strong toy marketing campaign, to subsidise production costs. The programs  had to become the commercials if the commercials weren't capable of generating the necessary revenue by themselves.

The commercials that do go after the child audience are more often designed to produce a pester response to push the desired decision from the parent. As more restrictions are placed on children’s advertising – junk food, for example – less advertising revenue is available for the production houses. This makes it harder for them to justify paying more to produce quality programs. The ban on junk food advertising during children's programs in the UK directly led to the ITV Network cosing their children's department. With no new children's prgrams commissioned by the channel, ITV viewers are left with imports and repeats in a shrinking time slot.

Nowhere is this commercial reality more apparent than in Australia. Most of the commercial channels have almost entirely scrapped their afternoon children’s schedule in favour of quiz shows and soaps. If children do get a look-in, it is usually in the form of very cheaply produced school-based panel games or science and nature magazine shows.

Quality children’s narrative television, particularly for the under-fives, is on the wane.

The Decline of Pre-School Narrative Television

But, let’s return to the under-fives. Once you’ve eliminated 'The Teletubbies', 'The Wiggles', 'Hi Five' and various other similarly formatted magazine or song-and-dance shows, a distinct vacuum of narrative storytelling becomes apparent. Even ‘Sesame Street’, probably the only notable pre-school show to come from the States, is very light on narrative in favour of instructional scenes. (If anyone even dares mention ‘Barney’ as an example of a good US children’s show, you are definitely reading the wrong blog. Back away slowly before I come after you with a serious lecture on what forms quality programming.)

Since the arrival of ‘Brum’, ‘Bob the Builder’ and ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ in the ‘90s, I’m having trouble thinking of a noteworthy narrative program for pre-schoolers from the last ten years.

The Golden Age

I grew up in the hey-day of British children’s television. The comforting simple worlds constructed by Gordon Murray, Oliver Postgate and other visionaries, with warm tales an even warmer narration. These wonderful ten minute bite-sized programs filled the daytime ‘Watch With Mother’ slot in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as that final cherished timeslot before the evening news. This was in the UK, before the BBC decided that ‘Neighbours’ was a better lead-in to the 6 o’clock news bulletin in the ‘80s. ‘The Clangers’, ‘Noggin the Nog’, ‘Camberwick Green’, ‘Trumpton’, ‘Chigley’, ‘The Wombles’, ‘Paddington Bear’, 'Bagpuss’, ‘Ivor the Engine’ and the king of them all, ‘The Magic Roundabout’, are only a handful of the programs that not only resonated with children then, but are deeply loved and remembered by middle-aged adults today.

A quick digression. I adore the child-like genius of naming the evil nemesis of Noggin the Nog as Nogbad the Bad. Not many parents would name their child Nogbad the Bad and expect anything less than total villainy. It is this kind of simple storybook logic that creates the magic.

These programs were always beautifully animated on a shoe-string budget but with wonderful results. A key ingredient was the warm, comforting narration of the stories. Listening to Brian Cant or Oliver Postgate gently set the scene still makes me feel fuzzy and cosy inside, like I’m being read to by a favourite uncle. Eric Thompson’s narration of ‘The Magic Roundabout’ must come in for special mention, as he completely threw out the original French scripts and developed his own unique and surreal stories to fit with the bizarre images. Thompson’s narration was just wonderful and magical and enough to spark any child’s imagination in amazing ways.

Standing the Test of Time

But what of today’s children’s programs? Do we really expect quality collectable figurines to be released of Tinky Wink or Jeff Wiggle in forty years time, being snapped up on eBay and displayed in home studies and on mantelpieces around the world? Was anyone surprised at the incredible reaction the ‘Camberwick Green’ sequence received in an episode of ‘Life on Mars’ in 2006, to the extent that the thirty-second sequence has now become one of the most memorable images from the show?

I am one of those nostalgic middle-aged adults with a complete collection of most of the programs mentioned above, and more besides. Rewatching some of them recently (I prepared for this post by watching a couple of episodes of 'Chigley'), there are certainly aspects that would never make it into a program today. The strict class-structure subtext of 'Chigley' and 'Trumpton' could be the subject of a major academic work, for example.

But for a child, these programs were a window onto the world. Simple stories of farmer Jonathan Bell helping the biscuit factory get their boxes of Classic Chigley Biscuits to the train station on time; or the tribulations of the fire brigade not having a place to stick up their posters advertising their bandstand concert. These might not seem incredibly gripping or revolutionary plots, but to a toddler, they gently demonstrated how people worked together. Anything more complex and the beauty would be lost.

A Slower Time

As a child, I can remember being far more excited about whether an episode of ‘Chigley’ would involve Lord Belborough’s train than any major conflict between antagonist and protagonist. I was quite content to watch Tiny Clanger chatting in whistles with the soup dragon, never minding that there was barely enough story to fill five minutes, never mind ten, by today’s standards. The pace was slow, but so was everything forty years ago, compared with today’s media constructs. It is no bad thing for children to learn to enjoy a slower pace. Attention spans have certainly been affected by the increasingly fast pace of everything thrown at children these days. They are small children – why should they need fast paced thrills to stay attentive?

The sad truth is that, without a financial imperative, television producers are unlikely to invest heavily in this kind of narrative programming for children on this scale again. With even public broadcasters having a harder time maintaining relevance in a faster multi-media world, the concept of producing programs purely for the sake of childhood development will always come second to whether there is enough of a merchandising angle available.

Writing for children is harder. Writing for children on TV is harder still. The sad thing is that it is our children who are missing out on the quality programming that will shape their viewing habits and expectations for their adult lives. Serve them cheaply produced rubbish now and they’ll be satisfied with low quality programs in the future. Children may not be a strong market for television programmers, but they are the future audience and therefore deserve just as much attention as we grown-ups.