ABSTRACT
Children’s television culture is quite different from the shared values of adult television culture. As Buckingham points out, children’s television is “not produced by children, but for them” and as such children’s television is often more a “reflection” of adult “interests or fantasies or desires” (1995, p. 47) and their view of childhood, rather than what children would choose themselves. This is a television culture where one group (adults) create content for another group (children), who have little or no say about what is produced for their benefit. Indeed children’s television culture invariably mirrors the commercial motivations and/or concerns and beliefs held by adults, and the key players in defining this culture are those who work in the children’s television industry. A second important observation is that children’s television culture, which is not that old, is
one of the most globalized forms of television, seemingly dominated by US-based transnational corporations and animation, conceived for North American audiences. For reasons of space this short article concentrates on the development of children’s television culture in the US and Western Europe, because the US is a key source of children’s programming around the world, and because Europe has been a key recipient of this content. Television content dedicated to children as a “special” audience, “with distinctive characteristics and needs” (Buckingham, 2005, p. 468) did not emerge in these countries until after 1945. Initially provision was patchy and limited to short blocks on generalist television channels at times when more valuable adult audiences were not available. Yet the advent of multichannel, multiplatform services from the 1980s onwards has created a large contemporary children’s television culture, based around dedicated children’s channels and programming that is at once transnational and local in its content, audiences and industry structures. In this chapter I will explore the connections between industry, content and audiences that define children’s television culture.
