The Head of Acquisitions at the BBC outlined the Corporation’s policy in a recent radio programme. She told us:
“The children of today are more used to the up-market, faster-moving things” and that “in today’s hugely competitive schedule we are up against about another twelve to fourteen children’s channels and we have got to stand out.”
As a policy that is, in my considered view, almost criminally preposterous.
Some accuse the BBC of being institutionally biased against markets. That may have some truth when it comes to news and current affairs, but that’s not how the late and much-mourned Oliver Postgate sees them when it comes to childen’s programming. Markets – and merchandise – are all.
” … the BBC let us know that in future all “programming” was to be judged by what they called its “audience ratings”. Furthermore, we were told, some U.S. researchers had established that in order to retain its audience (and its share of the burgeoning merchandising market) every children’s programme had to have a ‘hook’, ie, a startling incident to hold the attention, every few seconds. As our films did not fit this category they were deemed not fit to be shown by the BBC any more. End of story – not only for Peter and me – we had had a very good innings – but also for many of the shoe-string companies that had been providing scrumptious programmes for what is now seen as ‘the golden age of children’s television’…”
“Now, today, burdened with the search for the millions of pounds which they have to find to fund their glossy products, the entrepreneurs have to lead a very different sort of life. They must hurtle from country to country seeking subscriptions from the TV stations to fund the enormous cost of the films. Each of these stations will often require the format of the proposed film to be adapted to suit its own largest and dumbest market. They have to do this because, for them, children are no longer children, they are a market.”
To be fair to the BBC, there are still a few small areas of programming targeted at children where production values and solid scenery can go hang, because it’s all about the story. Like Eastenders. Trouble was, you were never going to be able to get much incest or domestic violence into Pogles Wood.
(If you want to see the “educational” BBC at its worst, take a look at its mealy-mouthed CBBC Remembrance Day page. Among the missing are the words “us” and “our”)
“Remembrance isn’t just about the World Wars though. It’s important to remember all people who have died while fighting for their country, including more recent conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Just couldn’t resist could they? But it’s easy to indoctrinate the Hitler youth with 3.5 billion at your disposal.
what is popular with toddlers today?
i am guessing the girls like mini skirts and high heels
and boys like gangsta chains and “bussing” their toy gat
Check the words carefully – its a legalistic get-out (cf Bill Clinton):
“Remembrance isn’t just about the World Wars though. It’s important to remember all people who have died while fighting for their country, including more recent conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. “
Why did the writer use the word “their” – why not “our country” or “the country” or “Britain” ?
The BBC omits the important news.
Internet Radio link
http://www.infowars.com/infowars.asx
Anyone notice BBC online’s “Have your say” today on government plans to “wage war against cigarettes” and make the sale under the counter. the topic of discussion wasn’t whether this was a good idea – instead it’s framed as “Do these proposals go far enough”. You have to love the BBC mindset.
Jack Hughes | 10.12.08 – 3:05 am | #
Well, at least they acknowledge that those fighting in Iraq are fighting for their country and not the “industrial-military-oil-Bush-Cheney” axis, which is of course what they really wanted to say.
I guess that’s as good as we’re going to get from our comrades at Pravda.
“Remembrance isn’t just about the World Wars though. It’s important to remember all people who have died while fighting for their country, including more recent conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“They don’t just mean cheesemakers. They mean all purveyors of dairy produce”
Laban,
Can you sort out the paragraphing and italics on this post? I can’t tell which is your thoughts and which of it is an article/speech being quoted.
Yesterday I babysat my sick grandson, aged 18 months. My daughter left the CBeebies channel on for him to watch. Granny had to endure this as well. A bigger load of politically correct, multiculti tosh you have never seen. These programmes are aimed at the under threes. In my opinion most are far too stimulating and alarming. One contained footage of howler monkeys and wolves, whatever happened to starting them off on puppies, kittens, small rabbits, etc. Even babies now are ‘thrown in at the deep end’. For sheer horror though you must catch Miss Hoolie on Balamory, unbelievable. Perhaps it is just me, but I will so miss Oliver Postgate.
Pat…
Did you catch Boogie Beebies?
Pat,
babies dont understand what is and isnt politically correct. They get this from those that live around them.
So in that respect, Al Beeb isnt “indoctrinating” the kids, its the adults around them that do this for them.
And to be fair, CBeebies actually has some good stuff, In the Night Garden, Charlie and Lola, Space Pirates etc 🙂
Not that I watch these shows you understand 😉
Regards
Mailman
Interesting that the subjects of war and Postgate come up together as he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector during WWII, although he later revised his views somewhat.
I have no kids, but am frequently astonished by the TV habits of my younger nieces. The childrens programmes are audio/visual Ritalin. Within seconds of watching, they glaze over and stare blankly and unblinking at the box. Childrens programmes look like soaps, soaps look like childrens programmes. It’s sad.
Incidently, another niece is training to be a teacher – and it is unnerving to watch how she is being shaped by the system and how various trendy memes are being worked into the minds of impressionable 5-year olds.
Repeat after me: Man made global warming is real… we are all to blame… all religions are good… man made global warming is real… we are all to blame…
I don’t think that this is a case of for or against markets.
Markets are supposed to give me choice. You describe a process where the BBC narrows the choice to identikit short attention span programmes. Just because a BBC HoD uses marketing terminology doesn’t make it a real market.
In a normal market when a supplier claims to know better than the customer he starts to lose business and eventually a competitor replaces him. In the UK until recently there was little competition and what there was contained a disproportionate number of people trained or previously employed by the BBC.
Postgate describes a situation where each director was given his own space and inevitably that created variety which contrasts sharply with the modern centrally controlled dictates he complains about.
You describe a process where the BBC narrows the choice to identikit short attention span programmes. Just because a BBC HoD uses marketing terminology doesn’t make it a real market.
TDK | 10.12.08 – 11:43 am |
Whilst theoretically you are correct, in practice you are wrong, and Postgate was right.
Case in point – Doctor Who. Look at the merchandising that series has spawned.
TheCuckoo:
Re your neice and the values she is being taught in teacher training – at a local primary school they switched on the news so the children could hear Obama’s victory speech in school time.
I have a Cert Ed. On the course I was interested in the teacher training lesson on maintaining discipline in secondary schools, to see how the ‘experts’ tell us to do it. All the lecturer said was ‘avoid confrontation’ And that was it!
They said ‘we aren’t teachers, we are learning facilitators’ and strange things like that.
And by the way, they do NOT like the joke about if you cannot teach, teach others to teach.
A hint for your neice as she is teaching primary school children – don’t use the modern methods like chunking for division – use the traditional methods and her class will be easily a year ahead of the others.
niece
I suggest your neice use both methods, aiming each at the children that will be most receptive to it. Chunking is very visually representative and reinforces multiplication table knowledge. Traditional remainder division is useful when it comes to modular arithmetic and fractions.
For once I find myself in agreement with Ipreferred.
Enjoy it while you can IP! 🙂
Mailman
Chuffer – must keep a look out for Boogie Beebies!
Mailman – agree with you about babies not understanding, but think that there is an element of what the Jesuits used to say about ‘getting them before they are five and you have them for life’. Neither my husband nor myself could be described as PC in any sense of the word, but both our children are ‘on message’… School, Beeb, combinations of both? I realise now how much more influence they had over our views.
The American Association of Paediatrics recommends absolutely no TV before 2 years of age and most informed experts, such as Dmitri Christakis and Fred Zimmerman seem to be anxious about TV’s effect on the brains of under-3s.
Early exposure to television, because of the special and well-documented neurodevelopmental stage of the newborn brain, poses risks.
No TV company should target this ‘market’.
Traditional ways of doing arithmetic are the best.
Children do not need to ‘understand’ what is going on – they just need to learn the methods by heart. We are only talking about 4 methods here: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
I make an analogy with driving a car – you don’t need to understand clutches, gearboxes, ackerman steering, differentials. You just need to keep practising each control until it’s second nature.
You could set a simple arithmetic test of say 10 sums and find that a group of 70 year olds did better than anyone still in the education system – including the teachers.
Balmory is multi culti drivel. But what more could you possibly expect from the Scots. As Frank Lampard said “They’d vote for a fucking Oran-Utang if it was labour.”
I cannot believe that people with otherwise sensible views can swallow what the trendy professors of education are teaching about the chunking methods of division. I am surprised they still have any credibility after destroying our educational system.
I think the higher up one goes in the teacher training establishment, the more bizarre and pointless rubbish will be found. Chunking is a waste of time in my experience, in the sense that 10 minutes on that would be much more productively spent on the traditional methods.
As a private tutor I find that all children move up in class after a bit of traditional coaching, including traditional methods of division and multiplication.
I taught one clever boy who was in the second set in Year 5. After a few lessons I kept asking him if he was in the top set yet, and I was surprised when he kept saying that he was still in the second set. Then one day he told me that he had accidentally done the work meant for the top set, had got it all correct and had finished before anyone else. He was then moved to the top set and remained top of the class until he left primary school and passed the entrance exam for Manchester Grammar School for Boys.
I taught another boy who secretly did his work the traditional way and then rubbed out his workings because his teacher forbade him from using the traditional method and insisted on his using the chunking method.
I taught another boy aged 13 in the second set. I gave him something similar to 8743 x 489 and he commenced with the chunking method. Fifteen minutes later he filled a sheet of A4 and then gave up. After a few weeks of traditional coaching he was top of the top set.
When I was at school in the 60s and 70s we were taught traditional methods, and there was therefore no need for tutors. Now teaching methods are so poor in the state schools near me that I can sometimes get a child to move from near the bottom of the class to near the top in four lessons of one hour each. This is only possible because they know so little, and if they were being taught properly I would not be able to achieve this.
Here is a question from a 1933 Eleven Plus paper:
multiply .0175 by 1.04 – the chunking way will take much longer
and another:
Take 9 times £12.16s.5 and a half pence from £500 – try chunking on that.
I can recommend an invaluable program which I found that generates extra-long multiplications and divisions which are too long to type into a calculator for the answer.
The website address is: http://www.homeworkgenerator.com
I agree with Jack Hughes and Hero from the Future – someone who left school aged 13 in the 1940s will be much better at maths than most of the school leavers of today.
What the hell is chunking? It sounds like something BBC senior staff get up to in the public toilets on hampstead Heath.
What I have never understood; It is clear from comments by the head of aquisitions that the metric being used to judge success is eyeballs/ratings. Successful programs are defined as those that capture a large audience share, failed programs as those that don’t. This makes sense to me, but then I don’t believe in ‘public sector broadcasting’ I have never understood or had it explained to me how you can believe BOTH in a market based definition of sucess AND in the importance of television funded through taxation/license fee.
If you as a BBC employee agree with ratings/popularity as the key criterion, toward establishing whether something should be on the air or not (as they invariably seem to do in interviews), how do your
justify the existence of your ‘service’
The ONLY rationale for publically funded TV that makes sense to me (for children or otherwise) is an explicitly paternalistic one. “We don’t know whats best for us and if its left up to the vagaries of audience choice our culture will end up in the gutter.”
In this model the BBC is there to make sure we eat our greens whether we find them tasty or not, presumably for the Cultural nourishment they provide.
While I don’t agree with the above, (at all) at least it has the virtue of being a somewhat coherent point of view.
Can someone explain the
“We need to forcibly take your money and then try to spend it as if we had to operate in a free market”
point of view to me?
I really don’t get it…
Jay Thomas | Homepage | 11.12.08 – 3:47 am
I think the answer to your question is politics.
The BBC tries to ride two horses at once: it sets out to make high quality programmes that are also popular.
It is possible to be high quality and popular at the same time (Arsenal FC springs to mind), but it is rare.
In the cultural sphere it is very rare indeed. There is a huge culture gap in the UK between those who are educated and those who aren’t. These groups have very different ideas about entertainment.
But the BBC has to get its ‘unique funding’ ratified every few years and so also has to prove that it delivers value for money to all. To this end it makes a lot of poor programmes designed to appeal to ‘stupid people’ and the whole feel of the networks tilt accordingly.
This is a shortsighted strategy as it puts off the ‘clever people’, who, though fewer in number, tend to have more political clout.
Ask the ‘stupid people’ what they think of the BBC and they will tell you it is all for snobs and the Establishment. Ask posh people and they will tell you it’s full of common little oiks like Jonathan Ross. The middle class complains meanwhile that it is intellectually dumbed down. Blacks and Asians think its stuffed with Whitey; whites think it has an unrepresentatively large number of blacks and Asians on.
The BBC is pleasing nobody.
Except, of course, itself.
‘Chunking’ is a trendy, modern and cumbersome way of dividing or multiplying which is being taught in some primary schools as the method to use, in particular by younger teachers, many of whom also cannot hold their pen correctly. It is a useless method and it means it takes 5 minutes to find the answer instead of 30 seconds by the standard or traditional methods – ie the methods everyone over 30 uses.
I also am a private tutor and I teach the traditional methods in maths; definitely not chunking. I get paid by results, unlike schools, and for £20 an hour the parents want to see some real improvement in a short time. If I wasted my time like the schools do with trendy theories, I would be out of business.
I know of a girl aged 13 who is in the second to the bottom set. She showed me her school book and every page is neatly done and all correct, although not marked.
She finds the work in her set far too easy.
Her parents have asked for her to be moved up, but because they are not pushy, no-one bothers.
“Trust us, we are dedicated professionals, with the interest of the kids at heart” —– NOT !
Another school – Two solid days in Year 6 this week building cardboard models, and another two solid days last week painting with cut up potatoes dipped in paint.
Another school – parent rings up to try and speak to the head of year – no-one answers – when they eventually do, promise someone will ring back. Nobody does. Simply not possible to arrange an appointment unless you go in and make a fuss.
Another school – teacher off on full pay for 6 months, back for one day to avoid some 6-month rule – then off on full pay for another 6 months
Make friends with the Head! Get in the clique! Get promoted! Get £10,000 extra a year for being co-ordinator of this or that and get out of teaching!
Teachers have created the mess in schools we see by supporting anti-discipline methods. Obviously not all teachers, but enough.
I agree with Tom’s and J Thomas’ comments – it is amazing how many people think the BBC is ‘for snobs and the Establishment’ because the BBC presenters ‘speak posh’ and wear ties. And that is the limit of their analysis. And as Britain degenerates further they will have no idea that the BBC had anything to do with it.
‘Some accuse the BBC of being institutionally biased against markets.’
If only.
Not to worry Little Richardjohn they only believe in markets in some sort NuLab/LibDem sort of way.
When it comes to the sort of policies you hold dear, say importing unlimited numbers of people from the 3rd world they believe just the same as you.
“say importing unlimited numbers of people from the 3rd world”
‘I’m afraid you’re in the realms of fantasy now, Jones.’
It really is amazing how the anti-bbc campaigners, who get all their rhetoric from newspapers, don’t realise that the newspapers have the most to gain from the death of the BBC.
The Mail’s massive involvement in local radio is the main reason for its campaign – at the moment.