Dear old BBC. It took her a while to catch up, but finally she’s down with the kids. Last week, it was announced that the BBC is investing an extra £34m in children’s television over the next three years. Not in making new content, but in enhancing the digital experience for the computer generation.
The corporation is investing, therefore, in the medium, rather than the message. There will be an array of podcasts, interactive games, videos, vlogs and apps spinning off from, and tying in with, the output on CBeebies and CBBC, including a Blue Peter app that allows children to display their homemade contraptions.
It’s the perfect present for the screen-addicted child: they’ll think it’s a licence to stay online for the rest of their lives, but we know that the BBC is providing, as it puts it, deliberately echoing founder Lord Reith, “quality, commercial-free, public service content that informs, educates and entertains”. It has created a digital space as innocent and disciplined as Camberwick Green. (Younger readers, please Google.)
The BBC has long invested in a brand of childhood made up of sticky-backed plastic and papier mache. The idea is that if television, like culture in general, makes us better people, the business of self-improvement should begin nice and early. But it is also reinvesting in Britishness at the precise moment when the product is starting to look suspect; with the new, forward-thinking CBBC, the kids will be seduced from the American channels, turned homewards and kept where we can see them.
It’s like when the Quakers hoped that making cocoa would stop the masses from drinking gin. So long as our children are clicking away on wholesome BBC websites, goes the theory, they’re not being sucked into the black holes that are Netflix, YouTube or Amazon.
By investing in online content, the corporation is finding its place in the digital age and also recalling its past. Television invented childhood for my generation, without having much idea of who we were or what we wanted. The BBC’s educational agenda was, I’m assuming, loosely based on the work of the child psychologist Jean Piaget. Children, Piaget argued, went through a series of developmental stages and programmes were available for each.
They could hand us anything and we’d watch it. Did they know how baffling this experience could be? Did they know how many thousands of us sat for hours in front of the test card girl with her creepy clown, her blackboard and her game of noughts and crosses and waited for something to happen? Who was this long-haired sphinx? And when was she going to do something? She still lives inside my head, popping up like a screensaver when nothing else is going on.
Having fed us images of stillness, television faces a future of constant change. The object itself is changing places: it began as a box in the corner of the room, it then became a screen in the centre of the home and now it’s a private experience on a handheld device.
The rituals around television have also changed. First, it was the most powerless person on the sofa who had to get up and change channels; then it was the head of the household who controlled the remote; now the child has all the power and owns the screen and can, the BBC promises, watch anything he or she wants, at any time.
I grew up in awe of television. I still love it, but 45 years ago it filled me with wonder. Waiting for it to warm up and blink on was like preparing to travel through the wardrobe in the living room, into a world that was like, but also unlike, home: Wimbledon Common, Mr Benn’s changing room, the world through the round window, the Blue Peter studio, even the square where the mysterious test card girl lived, walled in by those grey and black lines.
These were vivid places to me, but they were also, like the Clangers’ “small hollow planet, far far away”, essentially placeless. Even the real places were placeless; the Blue Peter studio, I discovered to my horror, was used to make other programmes too, which meant that it wasn’t actually a place at all.
The surreal placelessness of the children’s TV world was thrilling to those who felt at home in Britain and reflected the experience of thousands of immigrant children who arrived in the country in the late 1960s. My parents made the opposite journey, returning home from Malawi where I spent my first five years and so I was back where I “belonged” in a place that meant nothing to me.
The BBC was not my babysitter but my tour guide, leading me by the hand though this strange new land. The garden where Florence hung out with Dylan and Zebedee in The Magic Roundabout, being both somewhere and nowhere, was particularly pertinent; so, too, were the pots inhabited by Bill and Ben.
Like me, these creatures had no idea where they had landed and felt a bit spaced out. Meanwhile, the Clangers were always, I recall, confronting social change: a visitor appears, something falls from the sky, there is a new problem to solve. Their intense, trippy planet, like the gardens where the flowers spoke, might not look like England, but was most certainly English. Thus I discovered Englishness and Britishness and understood the BBC as a land of licensed misrule and controlled madness. Bill Oddie and John Cleese reigned over the adult world, but the carnival king for children was Blue Peter’s John Noakes. While Peter Purves looked dishy on the sofa and Valerie Singleton was being stern about a squeezy bottle, Noakes was out somewhere breaking the rules.
There he was, up Nelson’s Column without the proper safety equipment, or leaping from a plane with Shep by his side. That elephant would never have pooed on the studio floor had Noakes not encouraged him: he was a one-man crime wave! The more transgressive he became, the more uniform Peter and Val seemed to be. When Noakes died last May and it was revealed that his “idiot” persona was an act, I felt, for a second, that my childhood had been a lie.
Today’s young viewers live on the internet – the most placeless place of all. So the BBC is actually coming home.
Frances Wilson’s most recent book is Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey, nominated for the Baillie Gifford prize
