Histories of Children’s Television Around the World

Why Study the Histories of Children’s Television?

Several common frameworks rise from those seemingly different local developments discussed in each chapter. These local histories present global frameworks in operation, various balances and synthesis between public and private broadcasters, political environments and economies, local and global cultures; delineating tensions between different languages and between animations and live-action genres; tracing the effects of technological changes, as well as changes in the perception of childhood, questions of quality in children’s television, and diversity of representation. Grouped together, these chapters reveal a unique manifestation of global cultural phenomena.

Why is children’s television important? As part of global and local media landscapes, children’s television is a unique cultural form (Williams, 1974). It combines the technology of television with social meanings, attributed to it by different social actors, adults and children alike. Adults find children’s television to be a place where they can fantasize about childhood, but also as a place to try and control the presentation of childhood (Buckingham, 2002). It is also a commercial arena for the selling of goods, both within the cultural field––in the shape of stories, characters, images, music, as well as values, norms, and practices, and outside of it, in the world of material goods, like toys, food and drink, fashion, etc. For the children of the world, children’s television is, in many cases, one of the most important cultural sites for encountering the world and learning about it––from factual knowledge through evaluation of social interactions to behavioral orientation (Neuss, 2005).

The Contributors’ Diverse Points of View

The book gathers 12 national chapters from different big and small countries from all five continents. Each chapter was written from a local perspective by women and men interested in the developments of their national children’s television. As evident from their short bios, some contributors are traditional scholars (both established and emerging); others have extensive experience in the production field, where they have been involved in the actual production of programs; some writers have had the combined experience of actual production and scholarly research. Their exciting collaboration provides a unique and multifaceted perspective, integrating a rich and fresh global knowledge base about children’s television.

In writing their respective histories, contributors had to take in consideration the specific conditions in their countries in terms of political periods, as well as broadcasting circumstances. Authors from huge countries like Brazil and India had to examine local broadcasters as significant players in the field. The German author had to compare the histories of the two opposing Germanys working simultaneously, with several public broadcasters that operated within the Federal Republic of Germany becoming the dominant system after 1989. In other countries, like Italy or Canada, authors needed to address the inherent tension between local public broadcasters and private local and global ones.

The chapters also vary in their research methodologies. For instance, the Chinese chapter draws upon previous academic literature, official documents, reports, and yearbooks, whereas other authors have found very little previous scholarly data. Such are the Kenyan, Ecuadorian, Canadian, and Israeli chapters, where authors had to initiate a lot of interviews with producers and executives from early children’s television to current ones, in order to gather basic data for their historical production research. These exciting interviews, sometimes the first-ever conducted with a scholarly aim, turns the chapters into valuable historical documents for further research (I secretly hope it would encourage other researchers and graduate students from all over the world to go out and document their local children’s television producers and creators).

The Organization of This Book

The structure of the book’s chapters follows an alphabetical order. This was done in order to emphasize an un-hierarchical selection of the presentation of histories, providing each country with its unique value and meaning. Hence, all the chapters presented briefly in the following paragraphs stand on their own for readers to approach individually, according to their interests in children’s television of specific countries. Nevertheless, taking the book as a whole, this structure also encourages readers to keep a critical and comparing eye when reading each country’s findings and analysis. The final chapter suggests a possible cross-analysis but it is clearly just a starting point.

The Brazilian chapter addresses children’s television programming in terms of their potential to inspire, entertain, educate, and inform its young audience. Written by an experienced executive and creative producer of children’s television, it highlights the important mission of public channels such as TVE Rio de Janeiro and TV Cultura São Paulo. In the same vein, it criticizes commercial children’s programming for seeing its young audience as superficial consumers and depriving them from more inventive programs that could meet their developmental needs. The chapter also focuses on edutainment programs and how they have managed to survive in Brazil’s extremely turbulent political, technological, and economic conditions.

Canadian children’s television programming is described in the chapter as being developed through two key components: its funding infrastructure which supports Canadian-made programs, and its innovative and forward-thinking animated content. The chapter covers key moments in Canadian television history, including the emergence of Canadian animation, the growth of broadcasters and programming, the rise of Canada’s global impact, and the future of the Canadian industry. Its writers, a team of researchers with professional experience, claim that taken together, children’s television in Canada has had varying degrees of success in telling Canadian stories.

The Chinese chapter traces the development of children’s television in the vast country, which has been subjected to strict ideological control of the government since its birth. Dividing its history to five main stages, the chapter analyzes how China’s rapid transformation from a planned economy to a market-based economy has changed its children’s television. It also examines the commercialization of children’s television through a case study of the state-owned children’s channel CCTV-14. The chapter illustrates the strategies adopted by the Chinese party-state to maintain its strict ideological control over the media and to impose a particular version of ‘good children’ through the market.

Despite the cultural, political, and institutional differences, the German chapter traces several identifiable phases with typical developments of children’s television in the two Germanys becoming one. Thus, the historical analysis of children’s television in Germany shows that the strategies of broadcasters and the content they offered had always been influenced by the spirit of their particular period (zeitgeist), political interests, and since the mid-1980s, by explicitly commercial interests. Even KiKa, the public-service children’s channel, which started broadcasting in 1997, had its content divided in equal shares between the channel’s own productions or acquisitions, and the regional and public broadcasters’ programs. Nevertheless, KiKA succeeded in staying local in the current age of multiple streaming services, with one third of its programs being factual, serving to provide education and advice.