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Is children's TV in crisis?

Timmy the sheep
  • Posted at 12:31pm
  • 03 April 2009
  • by DavidButcher-RT
  • 2 comments

"Write about children's telly," a colleague urged me. "It's in crisis - Russell T Davies said so." I may have done something rude like roll my eyes at this point, not because I don't care, you understand, but because crises (moral, financial, ratings, quality - take your pick) in children's TV are like rows about MPs' expenses or gaffes by Jonathan Ross: if you miss one, don't worry, there'll be another along shortly.

The panic used to be that children watched too much TV. My parents certainly thought so. They talked admiringly with other parents about families they'd heard of who had banished TV altogether. (If anyone then had thought a child might grow up to watch TV for a living, the neighbourhood would have been on the march with burning torches.)

Now the worry for broadcasters is that they might "lose a generation" of children to rival attractions - websites, social networks, ever fancier games consoles. And they might. But if so, is that the kind of major social change you can hope to reverse by shifting a few more pounds into the budgets of children's shows?

In any case, it's hard to reconcile the dire pronouncements about children's TV with the quality of programming that bursts from the screen whenever children turn on, not least because the people who make it, often on a shoestring, are so fiercely committed.

Next week, for instance, CBBC is launching a comedy-history series called Horrible Histories, based on the bestselling books. It's not perfect, but for the budget (tiny, by the looks of things) it does a good job of making history fun. And it's hard to argue with a programme that illustrates the Georgian era with a line-up of Kings George I, II, III and IV singing a boy-band number about themselves.

Then for toddlers this week, there's the arrival of Timmy, Shaun the Sheep's little brother, in Timmy Time (Monday CBeebies). That is, of course, produced by animation gods Aardman, whose Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death (repeated on Good Friday BBC1) was the most-watched programme last Christmas.

Meanwhile, series like In the Night Garden are made here and shown around the world. At its launch a couple of years ago, I remember one of the producers railing against the lack of investment in children's TV (sound familiar?), having just spent many millions of pounds on creating a visionary and subsequently hugely successful series the like of which no other broadcast culture on earth could finance or dream up. If this is a crisis, it's one most other countries would love to have.

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Comments

  • Posted on 26 July 2009
  • at 12:50am
  • by john

it is so cute

  • Posted on 06 April 2009
  • at 9:57am
  • by Emily

I think there will always be this idea that children's tv from everyone's own childhood is better than what they show now. While I often feel this (especially when I see how Blue Peter has changed in just a few years- and not for the better in my opinion), there are still some good programmes made. In a few years, I hope to be making television programmes. Hopefully there will still be a young generation interested in watching tv by then if the internet and games don't completley take over!

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