Kids need their own view of the wider world. It’s not only their right, it’s also our duty to help them become engaged citizens. Television made here in the UK helps to provide them with that, but home-grown kids’ TV is severely under threat.
As part of its campaign to save British kids’ TV, Pact has released a viral film starring much-loved characters The Wombles. The Bad Ass Wombles is set in Central Park, New York and aims to highlight the effects of US imports on our children’s programming.
In October ’07 the Ofcom review of the future of children’s television made it starkly clear that production of children’s programmes made in the UK about the lives and concerns of British kids is in dramatic decline. Their shocking statistic was that of all the programmes shown on the many channels for children in this country only 1% are new programmes made in the UK! But this isn’t really surprising as the BBC cuts its budgets, ITV commissions almost no new programmes and drastically slashes the children’s time on ITV1, and Five scales back to cater only for pre-schoolers. British producers, respected around the world for the quality and innovation of their programmes for kids, are being sidelined.
The Ofcom Children’s Review has since fed into their wider examination of the future of Public Service Broadcasting They’ve identified the crisis as the first of many, with areas like current affairs, regional news and arts programming also likely to come under threat as digital switch-over approaches.
The basic problem is that without the leverage of the valuable airtime granted to commercial broadcasters like ITV, C4 and FIVE, there is little the regulators have to force these broadcasters to provide content which does not make them a lot of money in advertising revenue.
Ofcom opened a public consultation on four possible options for the future of public service broadcasting in the UK. Save Kids’ TV’s response focuses on the children’s issues, and the lack of time remaining to solve them. The consultation closed on the 20th June and Ofcom recently published a digest of the various responses. The next step will be their recommendations so the government in September ‘08.
For Save Kids’ TV the task is clear – to lobby the politicians to act, sooner rather than later, to produce funding to replace what has been lost through the fragmentation of advertising revenue and the ban on junk-food advertising.
Throughout 2008, Save Kids’ TV will also contribute to the public debate on the Government’s latest plans for childhood and other reviews such as the Buckingham review into the commercialisation of childhood, to ensure that kids’ cultural entitlement is firmly on the agenda. For a robust defence of children’s TV as part of that cultural scene take a look at our response to the Buckingham Review.
We need your help to pursue this goal, to alert parents and politicians to the importance of a rich media landscape, dedicated to our kids’ needs – and to achieve diversity of content and plurality of supply.
Visit our action page and find out what you can do, and sign up for our newsletter to register your support. For more on what Save Kids’ TV has been doing in this vital campaign see our Annual Review for 2007.
Our children deserve a media diet as stimulating as previous generations enjoyed! A diminished BBC is not enough. We think they deserve better.
Philip Pullman, patron of Save Kids’ TV
“Children need the best of everything, and that includes the best of television – not the cheapest. Save Kids’ TV is working to make sure they get it.”
