Unexpected Media

Save Kids’ TV

Greg Childs, a former colleague from CBBC, is involved in a campaign to protect children’s television from the damaging impact of audience fragmentation and the loss of revenue caused by the regulation of advertising.

“Save Kids’ TV is a coalition of parents, producers, artists, educators and others concerned about screen-based media for children in the UK. We aim to press broadcasting regulators and the Government to acknowledge the value of children’s television, and protect it in the face of growing financial pressures.

British children’s television – on the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Five – has in the past been widely acknowledged as amongst the most creative and innovative in the world. But changes in children’s viewing patterns, and the planned ban on certain types of advertising to children, are putting huge strains on commercial broadcasters.Channel 4 no longer makes children’s programmes and ITV (the UK’s second largest kids’ TV commissioner) has ceased all new children’s production. The mainstream channels are walking away from the children’s audience. The international channels produce some programming in the UK, but not enough to fill this gap. Despite the appearance of enormous choice in children’s viewing, the many channels available only offer a limited number of new high-quality programmes produced in the UK with British kids’ interests at their core.

Basically, kids’ TV doesn’t make money. For years commercial broadcasters have been stretching ever smaller budgets and chasing decreasing audiences as kids spread their viewing around the growing number of channels and other media outlets such as video-games and the internet.

Until recently ITV was the UK’s second largest commissioner of children’s programmes – with an annual spend over £20m. But it has commissioned no new programming since December last year. They are closing their in-house production unit, and pulling out of discussions with independent producers about new shows. Programmes like How2, Art Attack, My Parents Are Aliens and Jungle Run, have been axed.

ITV approached the regulator Ofcom to ask for a reduction in their Public Service Commitment from 8 hours to 2 hours of children’s programmes per week. ITV claimed that their children’s channel would take up the slack and provide children with a substantial diet of programmes. But the reality is that the channel will not commission new shows either. With no new programmes being made in Britain, CITV will soon become a channel of repeats and cheap imported programmes. Fortunately Ofcom has not yet allowed the reduction in hours. But there are still no rules about how much they spend, what sort of programmes they schedule, whether they make them or acquire them from other territories or when they transmit them. So in essence the problem remains the same.

ITV wants to abandon its children’s schedule in the afternoons so that it can compete with C4’s aggressive scheduling of game-shows. (C4 which makes no children’s programmes at all itself). If ITV does this, other commercial broadcasters may follow suit, especially under the pressure of reduced revenues from advertising. This will lead to the BBC being left as a monopoly supplier with only marginal production of programmes undertaken by the cable and satellite channels. Monopolies are not healthy. They lead to questions like – “why do we need to put out programmes for children when we could compete with daytime shows instead?” and “Why do we spend so much on children’s programmes when our competitors only spend a fraction of what we do?”

Save Kids’ TV is devoted to convincing Ofcom and all other stakeholders that children’s programming is far too important to be left to the market alone.

British kids would be the losers if their choice is diminished and their televisual diets restricted to American imports. Not only that, but a successful production industry will be decimated, leading to millions of pounds of lost revenue to the British economy.

No-one in our campaign would suggest that American programmes are all bad. Many of them are entertaining, stimulating and excellently produced. What we argue for is a mixed diet of programming so that kids get a window on their world and the wider world.

British society will be the ultimate loser as kids are divorced from their own cultural heritage and immersed in programmes from outside the UK. In some households television is the only way in which kids “connect” with the worldand about the society they live in, its values and the way people interact. To damage that connection would be potentially disastrous in the long term.

Children’s television is part of the “glue” which holds our society together. At a time when we are debating the quality of childhood, and the values we want our children to understand and accept, why would we take away from them a vital ingredient of a healthy personality and one of the bonds which draw us together in mutual understanding?”

To find out more about the Save Kids’ TV campaign, visit the website.