CITV at Gas Street

The problem with old kids programmes is that the adults who remember them will watch an episode at most, and today's kids aren't interested in them

I wasn't interested in the Watch With Mother programmes my parents reminisced about as much as my kids are about Bagpuss... I can barely get through an episode of Bagpuss!

The sad fact is that a lot of old kids TV that people remember fondly just isn't as good as it seemed at the time

So it's good to do for a one off novelty but regularly it just doesn't work, and it's been tried lots of times.

Nicktoons have recently been re-airing Rugrats at 10am starting from Season 9.

I beg to differ.

Me and my siblings watched a lot of Rainbow and Button Moon in particular, although I'm sure there were others. And I was born in the early 2000s!

They were really entertaining, even if the Thames skyline scared the hell out of 5 year old me.

I'm not saying all kids will like them, but I did because I gave them a chance.

Exactly. I Born in the late 90's and in the early 00's CBBC showed 60's & 70's Scooby-Doo episodes, Batfink, Rentaghost, etc and ITV had the old Thunderbirds episodes on. I loved them.

Give kids a chance and they'll watch anything - apparently my favourite tape to watch when I was under 5 was not Teletubbies or Tweenies - It was Bagpuss: The complete series. Supposedly I once watched the entire tape twice in one day.

In the early 90s when I was growing up we used to get all the Hanna-Barbera stuff from the 50s and 60s, as well. And they repeated old series of Grange Hill on Sunday mornings. There wasn't an aversion to "old stuff" then which there seems to be now.

I still beleive if Thames had won in 1991 citv would have kept reruns of dangermouse , count duckula and even Hector and Hugo.. There would have expanded the popularity of the series further.

I don't know if that's true or not, they could still have bought repeats of Thames shows even after they left the network if they wanted to. They were still repeating Spatz through to 1996 after all.

I’m sure Count Duckula ended up on GMTV at one point bizarrely. Didn’t repeats of Dangermouse on CITV get past 1993?

Thames kids department was spun off to become Tetra Films and continued to produce shows for CITV until 2000 including Mike & Angelo, The Tomorrow People and of course the various Rainbow revivals.

You say that - my daughter has quite enjoyed the episodes of Funnybones and Trapdoor we've found on YouTube. (And, slightly newer, Meg and Mog). Some kids' programmes don't age, other than in resolution and aspect ratio.

I think it depends on the age. My daughter who is nearly two enjoyed watching the 1970’s version of Paddington Bear on Amazon Prime recently, but I think if you showed an old kids show to a seven or eight year old, they’re more likely to get bored quickly.

The technical quality is a factor though, some kids who are used to bright coloured, fast moving, HD resolution content probably won't give the murky, dull, slow pre school programmes of my childhood a second glance.

I will have to try mine on some old stuff, though I'm not hopeful, once they can use a tablet episodes of Peppa Pig and Blippi are only a swipe away. That's the future.


Thing is that I watch today's programmes and think that this really is the golden age of kids tv. The BBC's kids output, especially Cbeebies is light years ahead of what I had as a child 40 something years ago. So much good stuff out there, why I'd want them to watch Rainbow I've no idea