ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that ‘the child’ is a discursive construct deployed by broadcasters, regulators and viewers that tells us a lot about how television is understood in culture. Despite changes since British children’s programming began in 1951, children still watch television in traditional ways, with adults, at home. Centralised broadcast and dispersed individual receptions of television since the 1930s enabled versions of public service broadcasting that attempt to raise cultural, educational and social standards and still do so. Television’s address to children promoted inclusion but also individuation, shared cultural references but also taste discrimination and forms of distinction and inequality through which British social life was reproduced. Some British children’s programmes also sell overseas but only because of the existence of transnational institutions and technologies for sharing television programming and a shared sense of what childhood is. In the Western world, childhood is seen in two contrasting ways. On one hand, children have been regarded as irrational, immoral and in need of adult guidance. On the other hand, children are regarded as innocent and naturally predisposed to be good. Regulation has therefore aimed to protect ‘vulnerable’ children, yet ironically, in Britain greater regulation has decimated children’s television production. Regulation on behalf of children is just a special case of more general attempts to control all audiences. Non-communication as much as communication is inherent in the nature of broadcasting itself: messages may not arrive, may not be understood or may fail to produce a desired effect. Contemporary interactive children’s media might promise greater benefit to children and fewer attempts to exercise power over their viewership, but they also imply greater investment in the communicative relationship. Inasmuch as ‘the child’ is necessarily an ‘other’, he or she is always elsewhere and problematises the concepts of communication and broadcasting.
