When I said "be realistic" I meant can you see them making a new show anytime soon?
It's a shame the recent Tiswas tribute wasn't live. If it was, it would only have taken one wildcard in the audience to challenge ITV on the running down of CITV - and to make a new Tiswas for the current generation!
On the other hand - maybe not. The first special guest (or god forbid the female co-host) would probably be Charley Uchea (if the first TMI was anything to go by).
Where British Childrens programming tended to focus on the more cerebral, educating youngsters as well as entertaining them, Yank Kids' shows are mostly just cheaply-made crappy adverts for equally cheaply-made crappy toys.
Sadly, children won't watch something educational if there is an alternative, and hence British children's programmes have gone down the plughole.
It all started in the 80s with He-Man/Transformers etc etc, and has been downhill ever since.
What worng with He-man/Transformers or other U.S kids shows I watch more U.S kids show than U.K kids shows as a kid and still today I watch US made over UK made shows
The real problem is that there are no real children's programmes makers anymore in the UK. All the CiTV programmes mentioned, so far, were predominantly made by TVS, Central and Thames with the odd one coming from Granada or Tyne Tees or Yorkshire.
These channels have merged staff have been lossed and through that there created a big void in producing decent quality children's television - many of them now work indepdently or work abroad.
Apart from BBC the only commercial channel now seriously commissioning new childrens programmes (albeit for the younger age range) is FIVE - and they are a success at it with international sales.
Thr real big slip for Citv was the experiment of stripping it through the week. They did not have enough new programmes to strip through and heavily relied on repeats - thus suddenly realising that they could actually cut children's budget and show repeats. Its from there that CiTV started to suffer - lost viewers (of which many never returned) and most of all the advertisers at the time hated the system and moved away.
How was CiTV to recover from that without giving it a more decent budget???
Fast food ads is just an excuse as many adverts during children's programmes have and always be for children's toys, loan companies, soft "healthy" drinks (e.g. Umbongo!!!!).
The real problem is that there are no real children's programmes makers anymore in the UK. All the CiTV programmes mentioned, so far, were predominantly made by TVS, Central and Thames with the odd one coming from Granada or Tyne Tees or Yorkshire.
Thereby illustrating perfectly the disadvantage of a single ITV company! Fifteen heads are better than one in that they might have differing ideas about particular issues and there would therefore have to be greater compromise affecting decisions such as how drastically to cut PSB provisions. But hey, ITV plc exists because it doesn't want any such obstruction of its long-term vision ie. ITV1 being just another stream on Freeview.
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Thr real big slip for Citv was the experiment of stripping it through the week. They did not have enough new programmes to strip through and heavily relied on repeats - thus suddenly realising that they could actually cut children's budget and show repeats. Its from there that CiTV started to suffer - lost viewers (of which many never returned) and most of all the advertisers at the time hated the system and moved away.
How was CiTV to recover from that without giving it a more decent budget???
That, possibly, plus the fact that the head of CITV at the time, Janie Grace (who genuinely cared about children's programming and had worked with Nigel Pickard at TVS) publicly criticised Carlton and Granada for cutting the CITV budget. The result - she was removed from her post, ironically just before Nigel was due to take up his post as ITV director of programmes. You could argue that Grace's removal facilitated the run-down of CITV from that moment on.
What worng with He-man/Transformers or other U.S kids shows I watch more U.S kids show than U.K kids shows as a kid and still today I watch US made over UK made shows
Nothing, if you're happy to watch a half-hour toy commercial made with the cheapest reduced animation techniques available and storylines that recycle themselves every two weeks.
It wasn't just British children's TV that was decimated by this crap -- many American producers were hit much harder, in particular Hanna-Barbera were irreparably damaged because they continued to produce their own line of cartoons, and cheaper producers such as the awful Filmation (who had always been in HB's shadow due to the poor quality of the former's product) took over by underbidding for everything.
What worng with He-man/Transformers or other U.S kids shows I watch more U.S kids show than U.K kids shows as a kid and still today I watch US made over UK made shows
Nothing, if you're happy to watch a half-hour toy commercial made with the cheapest reduced animation techniques available and storylines that recycle themselves every two weeks.
It wasn't just British children's TV that was decimated by this crap -- many American producers were hit much harder, in particular Hanna-Barbera were irreparably damaged because they continued to produce their own line of cartoons, and cheaper producers such as the awful Filmation (who had always been in HB's shadow due to the poor quality of the former's product) took over by underbidding for everything.
He-Man was the one that started it all, but it was Rainbow Brite that signalled that toy ad TV was here to stay when TV-am picked up the cartoon in 1985. Sharing that same Sunday slot was the Getalong Gang - and guess what, within weeks of the series airing the toys were on the shelves. From then on it was Care Bears, Transformers, whatever.
You'd think the IBA would have intervened but they didn't for some reason. Still, with Bruce Gyngell and his free-market ideologies ruling TV-am with an iron fist are we that surprised they were pushing these 30-minute toy commercials?
ISTR that there was another very similar toy to the Transformers stuff that came out about the same time by the Japanese toy company BanDai... but they didn't have a successful toy commercial behind them (theirs was a flop) so the Mattel clone (the BanDai product was devised over a year before the Hasbro/Mattel range) won out.
Sums the whole thing up really. I don't care if certain individuals *liked* these programmes, the *fact* of the matter is that they were made as cheaply as possible, and served as adverts for toys that were also made as cheaply as possible. That is not in question, so whether you like the programme or the toys or not, my comment still stands.
> Not every UK kids show was educational!Bernard's Watch?Zzzap?And by the way,I stopped watching How 2 briefly because I thought it was boring.
Hence the use of the word "tended". Not all US programming is banal either, but the cheaply-made crap that dominates most of the children's channels certainly is.
And as for Anime, name me one true Anime success on US/UK TV? It's all just watered down -- true Anime is aimed at an adult audience anyway, and is an art-form in its own right. Not so Pokemon et al.
