ABC TV for children

There are many wonderful TV shows for children, old and new, such as Sesame Street, Play School, Backyard Science, The Way Things Work, Bananas in Pyjamas and the former current affairs programs. Many animations and films of classic books are faithful to the original illustrations and text, and may encourage children to read the fuller content and greater imaginative stimuli in the books themselves - such as: Peter Rabbit, Tin-Tin, the Treasure-Seekers, Postman Pat, the Prince and the Pauper, the Never-ending Story, Noddy, Madeline, Babar, Angelina Ballerina, Mr Bean, Miffy, The Borrowers, Busy World of Richard Scarry, and The Famous Five and imagine a Burne-Jones version of Morte D’Arthur, or The Odyssey in the old Greek style.

However, overall the styles of animation, and children’s television, have somehow reached a sameness within a limited range of genres, and much is homogenous in quality. Films can be infantilising even when about teenagers. The screen becomes a carpet with Blyton’s overcrowded Enchanted Lands or De Grassi Junior High, Don’t Eat the Neighbours, Feral TV (with its sometimes blatant drug references), innumerable stories of animated machines and plasticine puppets, and stereotyped misadventures such as Mr Bumpy, a green, purple-warted monster who lives under the bed of a 10-year-old boy.

Infants’ love of the very simple BBC show, Teletubbies, indicates what “child-scale” really is for them. But, there can be drawbacks with such programs if children remain restricted to what is targeted to suit their immediate cognitive development, without developing further.

One problem is that makers of cartoons for children tend to be young male graphic designers, who delight in the grotesque, sassy, blindingly fast-moving, and the less civilised aspects of Japanese manga. Even ABC cartoons showing kindergarten life can model too much sassing and bullying.

A US analysis in 2006 of children’s daytime programs found that they showed more violence than adult primetime TV. The children’s program’s average was 6.3 violent incidents an hour, much of it darker and more realistic than it used to be, meaning the safety of the fantastical is removed.

Perhaps people with much experience in making children’s television or cartoons should be kept from key roles in producing the majority of new programs, since innovation may be less likely. From personal observation of television production, the common stereotypes and clichés are too easily perpetuated.
 
More input should be possible from outside the industry. There are still so many possibilities for programs that haven’t been made yet by the regular producers. Nearly 100 years ago Arthur Mee planned his Children’s Encyclopedia as a way to give children the very best of the world’s civilisation. Television for children should seek the same.

Children’s radio seems to me a more urgent and valuable enterprise; to develop children’s language for thinking, understanding, and imagining. From infancy onward, many sources, including television, saturate young people with musical and visual excitement, to the detriment of the spoken and written word - which are essential bearers of our technology and heritage.

It is doing childhood a disservice if it is assumed that children and young adults must be constantly entertained in order to keep them “out of the adults’ hair”. Childhood and children’s free play have the important function of giving time for active learning in the practice of growing up, in both imagination and real life.