Childrens TV

Children are catered for with family formats. In this multi-channel environment, it's a waste of resources to once again schedule children's programmes in kids peak-time when they'll just watch the tightly targeted kids channels or The Chase/Tipping Point anyway.

There are a load of children's channels, but how much of what's on them is original UK content? Outside of the BBC and Channel 5, not a lot

The BBC is the right place for PSB kids content, what they produce is of a high standard. Channel 5's pre-school content works for them commercially, but in this day and age, is it right to mandate ITV and C4 to produce original UK content for a tiny audience on their main channels when the market has changed irreversibly?

On CITV, only thing that comes to mind is Thunderbirds Are Go, most other shows are either imports or repeats.

Funny how, as a child, getting up for school was a nightmare during the week, but Saturday/Sunday morning I was up at 6am and in the living room watching the kids shows on Channel 4 like the Mario Bros show or Sharky & George before switching to Live & Kicking or SMTV Live when they started.

The teen market has long been forgotten in this debate and you'd think really they would want to entice them to their on demand service. However of course, just as always has been the case, teens want to watch shows which are technically aimed at an older audience so the likes of Love Island and End of the F***ing World do that job far better than any modern day equivalent of Grange Hill might.

In fairness to Grange Hill it began to aim at younger audiences as late as 2000 and so wasn't aiming at the same target audience it had been when it launched in 1978. By rights it should have failed miserably - a TV show about kids in school aimed at kids who had just spent all day in school. But it didn't and so it ran for 30 years.

I suppose the likes of Ackley Bridge is effectively the modern day Grange Hill, after all as posted above Channel 4 effectively class it as teenage programming. That and i suppose the Educating Greater Manchester/Yorkshire/etc series.

There's a mountain of questions that need answering as to exactly what sort of children's programmes should be shown on ITV, C4, and C5 and whether it's even a worthwhile venture or a tickbox exercise. Is there any particular reason why these channels should be used as a conveyor of children's programmes in the future? London Lite is spot on when he says that the days of kids watching a block of programming on weekday mid-afternoons and weekend mornings are long gone. These blocks of children's programming served the nation well back in the era when most households had just four terrestrial channels but they are now well and truly analogue anachronisms.

I'm becoming increasingly doubtful that kids older than about 7 want to watch much of the traditional CBBC and CITV fare of bygone afternoons in the 1980s and 90s or the Saturday morning shows from the same era apart from cartoons and some factual programmes.

My 11 year old nephew rarely watches broadcast TV and instead prefers to watch DVDs and YouTube programmes about Minecraft and civil aviation.



Is Britain capable of producing programmes that kids want to watch outside of the realm of the BBC?

Long gone because the option has gone. I suspect (but don't know) those are peak viewing times for the kids channels, but unlike back in our day the chances of having new original UK content at those times is slim.


Also worth noting that by far the biggest breakout hit in the market over the last few years has come from a children's strand on a terrestrial channel.

Children's programmes achieved the viewing figures that they did during the heyday of analogue TV because of scarcity. The idea of children's programmes being available 24 hours a day was just a dream to most kids, so whenever the rare chance emerged to watch such programmes - like weekday afternoons and saturday mornings - millions of kids up and down the nation would huddle around the TV because that was the only opportunity that they had.

I will even admit to watching CBBC on a TV in an electrical shop whilst out and about.

The creation of CBBC and CITV channels followed by the analogue switch off technically rendered children's programmes on BBC1 and ITV1 as redundant.

I'm not so sure about peak viewing times but availability of children's programmes throughout the day now means that viewing times are more varied. Back in the 1980s and early 90s anybody who wanted to watch children's programmes at 8PM had to make do with videos unless they were one of a small minority who had satellite or cable. Does anybody remember The Children's Channel?

The separate ITV companies made plenty of children's programmes over the years but this feature has been lost as a result of creating a unified ITV that outsources production. It still has a back catalogue of children's programmes that can be exploited.

TCC didn't air as late as 8pm - none of the kids channels did in the analogue era, it's only when Sky Digital launched that they ever went past 7pm, and TCC didn't survive long enough to go onto digital.

Not true cartoon networked lasted till 9pm before switching over to tnt.

But the point of the thread to get more orginal British content is vaild.