University of Strathclyde

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Children’s literature Week 5

BBC Children’s television

1. Why think about television in this class?

TV as the enemy of childhood/displacement of beneficial activities, e.g., reading? E.g., Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood (London: Orion, 2006); Barry Gunter and Jill McAleer, Children and Television: The One-Eyed Monster? (London: Routledge, 1997); David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2000); Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (London and New York: 2nd ed. Penguin, 2002 (1977)); Barry Sanders, A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (New York: Vintage, 1995):

[Television] debilitates young people ... short-circuits the natural, emotional development they need to become healthy human beings... strangles the development of their own voices, and denies them their imaginative powers...washes the child clean of his or her own images... weakens the will... [and] delivers one of the most debilitating psychological blows in denying the youngster the chance to turn inside himself or herself and to have a silent conversation with that budding social construct, the self. (pp. 39-44)

But in considering the construction of childhood and the cultural context of literature we cannot ignore television; the pervasive mass media form from 1950s onwards, and linked to the postmodern condition:

Our contemporary notion of childhood could be seen as part of the Enlightenment project, with its emphasis on the development of rationality as a means of ensuring the stability of the social order. From this perspective, the ‘death’ of childhood’ might be seen as a symptom of postmodernity, a reflection of the fate which awaits us as the ‘dream of reason’ finally collapses... The blurring of boundaries, the demise of selfhood, the dominance of visual culture, the death of the social – all of these are ideas which       frequently recur in the rhetoric of postmodernism. (Buckingham, 2000, p.33)

1.1 Similaritity of approaches

Primacy of the text . In this class the literary text is main object of study - not merely a means of study but an end in its own right. In today’s session we are NOT looking at effects of television, nor considering what real children might think of the texts; instead we are looking closely at television texts themselves. Yet medium of television and its modes of production and consumption are very different to those of literature; arguably, a television ‘text’ is difficult (impossible?) to extricate from modes of production and consumption. Who is the ‘author’ of a television text? What do we consider a television ‘text’ to be? TV criticism occasionally borrows from Film Studies to offer an arts based, aesthetic analysis of TV programmes, but often reserved for texts considered to be ‘quality television’ (e.g., John Caughie and John Corner). Until recently, children’s television an under-researched area in terms of its aesthetic values - perceived marginal value status of ‘children’s media culture’ (as distinct entity and field of academic enquiry), other than as subspecies of other forms of enquiry (e.g., psychological, social and educational development):

Until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics of the child... we have a lot invested in seeing childhood as banal and transparent. Bazalgette and Buckingham identify a “division of labour” within academic research that       subjects youth culture to intense sociological scrutiny while seeing childhood as a fit subject only for developmental psychology ... This marginalisation affects not only how we understand the child, its social agency, its cultural contexts, and its relations to powerful institutions but also how we understand adult politics, adult culture, and adult society, which often circle around the spectre of the innocent child. (Henry Jenkins (ed.) The Children’s Culture Reader. ‘Introduction.’ (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998.) p.2)

2. Why BBC children’s television?

Historic significance and nature of BBC. Children’s content a central plank of BBC since early radio days of 1920s and '30s; children’s TV began in 1946, with dedicated structure by 1948. “However it was the arrival of ITV in 1955 which initiated competive plural provision of PSB in children’s programming.” (Ofcom  Report on The Future of Children’s Television Programming. Ofcom, October 2007) Our understanding of the form and function of children’s TV in UK bound to concept of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB)

2.1 Public service broadcasting (PSB)

What is PSB? No concrete definition, although Lord Reith’s attributed statement that it was “to inform, educate and entertain” remains part of the BBC mission statement. Ofcom uses a set of purposes and characteristics to define PSB, but cannot prescribe certain types of content (e.g dedicated news provision).

2.2 Purposes and characteristics of PSB (Ofcom Report on The Future of Children’s Television, October 2007)
            Purposes

• To inform ourselves and others and to increase our understanding of the world through news, information and analysis of current events and ideas
• To stimulate our interest in and knowledge of arts, science, history and other topics through content that is accessible and can encourage informal learning
• To reflect and strengthen our cultural identity through original programming at UK, national and regional level, on occasion bringing audiences together for shared experiences
• To make us aware of different cultures and alternative viewpoints, through programmes that reflect the lives of other people and other communities, both within the UK and elsewhere

          Characteristics

• High quality – well-funded and well-produced
• Original - new UK content, rather than repeats or acquisitions
• Innovative – breaking new ideas or re-inventing exciting approaches, rather than copying old ones
• Challenging – making viewers think
• Engaging – remaining accessible and enjoyed by viewers
• Widely available – if content is publicly funded, a large majority of citizens need to be given the chance to watch it

2.3 Doctrine of ‘uplift’ or betterment

Implicit in purposes and characteristics is doctrine of ‘uplift’: PSB is ‘good for society’, not merely reflecting culture but shaping it for the better. BBC has been characterised as a church, shepherding its congregation to enlightenment in matters of taste and culture. Raises questions as to who is the arbiter of taste and how is the value status of cultural artefacts decided. (Does PSB infantilise its audiences in this respect?) Children as ultimate possibility of utopian future:

Teaching ‘how to appreciate’ is of paramount importance... A child who early learns the loveliness and purity of a Mozart minuet will not in later years be content with ‘Yes, We have no bananas’. He has learnt the difference between gold and tarnished tinsel. He has won an abiding joy. He will seek to share that joy. His character is a-building. (Corbett-Smith (Artistic director of  BBC ‘Children’s Hour’), 1924, quoted in David Oswell, Television, Childhood and the Home (Oxford: OUP, 2002) p.33)

3. Specificities of the medium of television

Why is TV charged with this potential (or burden) of ‘public service’? Newspapers, films, literature or other media/art forms not produced and distributed in the name of public service. Newspapers, films, literature etc produced and distributed in free market economy: why should broadcasting be demarcated and protected? TV seen as central vehicle/expression of democracy (constituting the ‘third estate’). What does that mean for children? David Oswell posits that PSB originally offered entirely new means of citizenship for children: merely by consuming the broadcast medium children became active citizens. Children’s ‘rights’ to media enshrined in United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). What content meets those rights? Many television theorists argue that content is irrelevant - as Marshall McLuhan suggested, “the medium is the message”.

It’s not what you watch. The very nature of the television experience apart from the program content is rarely considered. It is easy to overlook a deceptively simple fact: one is always watching television when one is watching television rather than having any other experience. Whether the program is Sesame Street or Batman... there’s a similarity of experience about all television watching. (Winn, p.3)

3.1 Mode of address

TV's characteristic mode of address is direct to the viewer; it creates a simulcrum of ‘liveness’ or ‘instaneity’ (see John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1982)); the original broadcast television form is vanishing or ephemeral in nature (programmes were broadcast live and not repeated or recorded): helps us understand critique of  television as a voracious medium, always needing new content, effectively creating, rather than just reporting, the broadcast event and tending to trivialise. TV as public yet domesticly situated medium also predicates distinct mode of address – problematic for child audience? Does movement of audience towards private, individual consumption (solitary watching in bedrooms) affect that mode of address?

The form of intimate and individual address to the child presented certain problems for the BBC... debates about the construction of children’s broadcasters as ‘Aunts’ and ‘Uncles’ provide evidence of the difficulties of this form of     address. (Oswell, p.28)

Current mode of address not that of Aunt or Uncle but of ‘best mate’ or of ‘cool older brother’. (e.g., prominance of the male comedy duo as presenters of CBBC)

3.2 The schedule and ‘flow’

Raymond Williams has theorised television as ‘flow’, pointing to TV's ability to mix genres and modalities as a defining characteristic of the medium, outweighing the significance of individual programmes or forms of content. The schedule is basic unit of television structure which, until recently was key vehicle in delivery of PSB. A schedule is designed to produce ‘mixed diet’ of programming: there is ‘something for everyone’ and children encounter a balanced range of programmes; can also be tailored to domestic routines of the (imagined) household: morning programmes encourage audience to get up and go (LazyTown); evening shows suppose children are getting ready for bed (In the Night Garden). (Note too analogies of consumption used to describe television ‘viewing’).
Embedded in the schedule is notion of captive audience and restricted programme choice – how does that translate to modern media landscape of 20+ dedicated digital children’s channels operating 24/7?

3.3 The channel

BBC children’s content split into two age-defined brands, CBeebies (for children up to six) and CBBC (for children 6-12). BBC Children’s department no longer makes content for ‘children’ over 12. ‘Classic’ children’s dramas such as Grange Hill or Byker Grove would be excluded from current channel structures. NB Related disappearance of children’s content from mainstream television.

3.4 Narrative form and ‘distracted viewing’

Just as serial publication will impact on narrative structure of a novel, so too is a television narrative structured by temporal specificity. The ephemerality of television/ importance of the schedule has led to restricted number of television formats, with series (e.g Shoebox Zoo) and serial (e.g LazyTown) forms generally fitting into specified programme lengths (typically max 15 minutes for CBeebies and max 30 minutes for CBBC) across standard ‘seasons’ (typically 12 or 24 episodes commisioned). How might this determine complexity of narrative in TV content? TV theorised as  inviting ‘distracted viewing’ (John Ellis, John T. Caldwell) as opposed to concentrated ‘gaze’ demanded by cinema film (or novels) - TV narrative form must allow and invite the viewer to join the narrative at any point. This applies at macro and micro levels – e.g., pace of editing and moments of closure might impacts on construction of the child both inside and outside the text. (Sesame Street met with huge resistance at first due to its lack of single coherent narrative). How do genre conventions contribute to an economy of narrative form?
  
3.5 Production culture and the production of culture: UK  originated content

Much of the structural demands of television have economic basis. Little room for creative risk-taking even within PSB, which is insulated from commercial concerns and has additional needs of representing the UK children’s audience to self and others. How is the PSB characteristic of being “engaging” squared with the purpose of “reflecting and strengthening cultural identity” in a media landscape where anglophone products enjoy global export potential and where US content is culturally dominant? (Ofcom statistics confirm that new, UK–originated content accounts for only 1% of the programmes available across the 20+ digital children’s channels; if BBC did not commission and produce UK originated content it would disappear from the screen.) Currently BBC children’s production is centred in London with BBC Scotland a ‘significant other’ producing 20% of in-house children’s content and mandated to provide an ‘alternative voice’ to London production. Competing demands of representation and uplift? A tendency to represent positively or to glamorise or romanticise the television subject (whether a child, a setting or a culture)?

4. The ‘gap’ between adult producer and child audience/reader/consumer

Jacqueline Rose claims ‘children’s fiction’ as an “impossibility” or misnomer, even an abuse, in that ‘children’s’ fiction is produced by adults and necessarily locates children as an object of adult desire. Critics of children’s television also explore this concept and I would argue that the BBC uses various strategies to efface the gap between adult producer and child audience:    

children’s television is not produced by children but for them. As such, it should be read as a reflection not so much of children’s interests or fantasies or desires but of adults’. The texts which adults produce for children represent adult      constructions both of childhood and (by implication) of adulthood itself. (David Buckingham, ‘On the impossibility of children’s television: The case of Timmy Mallett’. In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, eds. (London: British Film Institute, 1995. pp.47-61), p.47)
     
what might be taken for children’s culture has always been primarily a matter of culture produced for and urged upon children. The earliest stages of maturation have always been the period in which the young are most intensely subjected to cultural forms designed for and directed at them. Childhood is a condition defined by powerlessness and dependence on the adult community’s directives and guidance. Culture is, after all, the repository of social learning and socialization, the means by which societies preserve and strengthen their position in the world.
      The forms of children’s cultural expression are therefore intimately bound up with the changing alignments that define a community’s social beliefs and practices of cultural transmission. … Children’s culture is always highly inflected with societal purpose. (Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. (London and New York: Verso, 1993.) pp. 44-45)

Discourses on children’s television (including PSB) foreground notion of commercial exploitation of children more so than in the disourses around children’s literature. Is television a particularly exploitative medium? Is visual/screen culture intrinsically more objectifying than print culture? Are children more susceptible to exploitation? Such exploitation may be subtle, effaced by the ‘good intentions’ of the producer (eg. PSB) or the seeming ‘empowerment’ and ‘aspiration’ offered by a child centred text or a child centred world. Juliet Schor, in Born to Buy (New York: Scribner, 2005) posits that seeming ‘empowerment’ of children is often dependent on construction of adult and child desire for childhood as radically different: marketers assume children are resistant to adult control and stricture and so co-opt discourses of resistance, of ‘us and them’, of ‘anti-adultism':

It’s part of the official advertising world view that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable... Similar trends can be found in programming. [Parents] are now depicted as neglectful, incompetent, abusive or invisible... It’s “parents as nincompoops” ... it’s important to recognise the corporate message: kids and products are aligned together in this really great, fun place, while parents, teachers, and other adults inhabit an oppressive, drab and joyless world. The lesson to kids is that it’s the product, not your parent, who’s really on your side.

5. Neil Postman and ‘The Disappearance of Childhood’

Writing from a US perspective (prior to new media technologies), Neil Postman posits a famously bleak view of television and of screen media, holding it responsible for the “disappearance” of childhood:       

This means more than that childhood innocence is lost, a phrase that tends to imply only a diminution of childhood’s charm. With the electric media’s rapid and egalitarian disclosure of the total content of the adult world, several profound consequences result. (p.85)

I believe it is clear enough because of their relentless revelations of all cultural secrets, the electric media pose a serious challenge both to the authority of adulthood and to the curiosity of children... We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children. (p.90)

5.1  Print culture as ‘the incunabula of childhood’

Postman’s theory contrasts visual and print cultures: visual culture characterised as accessible to all and requiring no particular skill to decode, whereas print culture requires and sustains vigorous intellectual training and engagement. Postman links our construction of childhood with our ability to control and delineate adult spheres of knowledge – suggests print is the ideal medium for this and therefore associates the ‘invention’ or “incunabula” of childhood with the rise of print culture:

Freud and Dewey crystallised the basic paradigm of childhood that had been forming since the printing press: the child as student whose self and individuality must be preserved by nurturing, whose capacity for self-control, deferred   gratification, and logical thought must be extended, whose knowledge of life must be under the control of adults. (p.63)

5.2 Visual culture – no ‘secrets’ or ‘shame’

Postman characterises television as “the total disclosure medium”, in which, due to the representational and referential nature of the visual image, adults and children alike are fluent. TV’s voracious appetite for content and constant reframing of what might be termed ‘the shock of the new’ leads to trivialisation of all issues and particular drive towards those that are taboo or mysterious. Postman‘s concept of TV's eradication of shame exemplified by what he considers to be the now unremarkable use of “eleven- and twelve- year old girls as erotic objects. That is not to say that adult males did not until recently covet pubescent girls. They did, but the point is that their desire was kept a carefully guarded secret, especially from the young themselves. Television not only exposes that desire but shows it to be an invidious inhibition and a matter of no special consequence.” (p.91)
 
5.3  The ‘adultified’ child and the ‘childified’ adult

Postman argues that media representations of children no longer signify ‘child’ but signify ‘adult’: “children [as children] are disappearing from the media, especially from television” (p.122). 

6. LazyTown (LazyTown Entertainment, 2004-2007)

Originating in Iceland and spanning some fifty episodes, LazyTown is a ‘bought in’ BBC children’s programme, not an inhouse production or CBeebies commission. It is broadcast in over 100 countries. Textual analysis examples will be given in class to illustrate and explore the themes of the lecture.

7. Shoebox Zoo (BBC Scotland/ Shoebox Productions, 2004)

A huge commission for BBC Scotland; it ran for two seasons of thirteen episodes each. The animation sequences (part CGI, part stop-motion) were produced in Canada (the show was also broadcast on Canadian  public service television). The show capitalised on BBC Scotland’s reputation as a producer of ‘Scottish’ content (Balamory) in satisfaction of PSB criteria. Textual analysis examples will be given in class to illustrate and explore the themes of the lecture.

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