±«Óãtv

The ±«Óãtv’s Oral History Collection often touches on the story of children’s programmes over the decades. Here, we dip into one key part of this story: some of the pioneering TV producers who wanted programmes to help children become full and active participants in the world around them - to grow into citizens, not just consumers.

Those of us over a certain age will possibly have distant, but also intense - and most likely fond - memories of listening to radio and watching TV as children. Growing up before the War, there was Children’s Hour on the radio, with its stories and music and talks. Growing up after - in the early-1950s - there were television favourites such as Muffin the Mule, the Woodentops, and this, from 1952, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men:

The ±«Óãtv has always provided programmes as entertainment. Even that dour figure John Reith believed that providing programmes of "pleasing relaxation" was one of the ±«Óãtv’s public purposes. Yet he had also demanded programmes of education and information. Broadcasting with a Reithian spirit meant a civilizing mission, including everyone in the national public realm of ideas, culture and debate.

From the start, children were part of this "inclusive" ideal. But Reith had also said that as well as providing every home with "the best", the ±«Óãtv had a duty to avoid "things which are, or may be, hurtful". Children, especially, needed protecting. They needed to be introduced to the world and its ways gradually.

But how gradual was too gradual? When Freda Lingstrom ran Children’s Television in the early-1950s, she and her team operated on the basis of age "boundaries", stories of the "Three Bears" type for 3-5 year-olds, stories of the "Snow White" type for 5-7 year-olds, and perhaps Arthurian legends for the 7-9 year-olds.

Lingstrom's real interest, though, was in making programmes for the youngest age groups, most famously, Watch with Mother and the various puppet shows associated with it. These were hugely popular. Yet the gap in provision for older children was obvious. And children’s TV was not immune to wider changes in broadcasting.

After 1955, the ±«Óãtv faced competition from commercial TV. And, as the 1950s progressed, so too did social tastes, with an increasing desire for informality, less deference, and realistic representations on air. When Joy Whitby, a former researcher and studio manager, joined the Children’s Department around this time, she sensed it was the right moment for some innovative rethinking of the Watch with Mother approach:

It was around this time, too, that Owen Reed took over from Freda Lingstrom as head of Children’s Television. Reed had worked at the ±«Óãtv since before the war - acting and producing, mostly in radio. His immediate concern was to stop the haemorrhaging of younger viewers to ITV without any obvious reduction in programme quality.

One solution was to create more space for action and adventure. Another, as he recalls in this interview recorded later for the ±«Óãtv Oral History Collection, was to find new formats for children who had grown out of Watch with Mother.

In her own interview for the ±«Óãtv Oral History Collection, Joy Whitby provides a fascinating insight into how one of the programmes mentioned by Reed emerged: Play School, first screened when ±«Óãtv Two launched in 1964. In particular, she reveals the importance of her own personal and professional networks in helping her towards a more adult, and riskier approach to what happened on screen:

The Play School ethos, allowing a little bit of spontaneity and the odd rough-edge, was not just in the interests of TV naturalism. It was also about letting children watching at home know that perfection was not always required of them, that making a mistake was not the end of the world.

Another notable Play School innovation can be seen in the opening few minutes of this episode.

In this particular episode, the presenters are Carol Chell and Derek Griffiths. They were part of a much larger rota of presenters, and one that included men as well as women, young as well as old, a huge variety of accents, and, in the case of Griffiths, an early example of a presenter from an ethnic minority appearing regularly on British television in a programme that wasn’t specifically about ethnic identity. As Joy Whitby testifies in her interview, this embrace of diversity was a very deliberate Play School policy:

1972 witnessed the launch of Newsround, originally called, John Craven’s Newsround. Edward Barnes, who later became head of Children’s Television, saw the new series as symbolic of a long-lasting principle, one defended by other heads before and since, including Monica Sims and Anna ±«Óãtv.

This was, that in the screen time available between coming-home-from school and the start of evening programmes, children should be offered the exact same range of genres as the adults: drama, natural history, entertainment, and, news - something which, on Barnes’s own arrival, was still absent:

Newsround has always been careful in working out the limits of children can tolerate seeing on screen. But potentially distressing stories have rarely been ignored. In recent years, for example, there have been special films on Eritrean refugees, the Japanese tsunami, "growing up black in America", and online bullying.

Similar thinking lay behind the evolution of children’s drama in this period. Here too, we see a decisive shift towards greater realism - and a stronger acceptance that very little should be off-limits provided a child’s perspective on matters was always given precedence.

The school drama series Grange Hill provided the classic example - demonstrating that a whole range of difficult social issues could be explored if it also succeeded as a credible soap-opera. Here are the opening minutes of the very first episode from 1978, introducing us to the series’ social setting as well as its main characters - and some of the troubles that would follow them around in the years to come:

When she worked in Children’s Television, Joy Whitby’s partner was Tony Whitby, then the Controller of Radio 4. In that role, he had once said that "Not broadcasting certain types of programme", even if some in the audience were scared or upset as a result, was wrong for a public service organisation such as the ±«Óãtv. In a responsible society, he explained, "certain questions need to be aired… if that society is to grow in a healthy way".

He wasn’t, of course, talking directly about children’s programmes. But those words, about healthy growth requiring a limit be set to protectiveness, neatly reflect the outlook of those at the ±«Óãtv who have been charged over the decades with helping younger viewers on their way to adulthood, as can be seen here, in Edward Barnes’s fascinating recollection of Grange Hill’s origins, and the generations of thought and experience that lay behind it: