ABSTRACT
In the everyday lives of young British children, exposure to television programming scored in the style dubbed ‘pop scoring’ by Jeff Smith (music ‘composed or compiled in one or more popular musical styles’) and thereby saturated with semiotic codes derived from Western rock and pop musics, is remarkably high. 1 Recent research has demonstrated that music occurs during more than 80 per cent of the waking lives of three-year-olds and that the main activity facilitating these musical episodes is the audio-viewing of television programmes, advertisements, trails and films targeted at this audience. 2 This chapter explores how young children’s television immerses the under-fives in a sea of musically-mediated stories and subtexts which, while manifestly offering a range of educational, moral and developmental instruction, latently contributes to the moulding of individual subjectivities, not least by preparing children to undertake gendered roles as productive consumer-citizens in contemporary British society. Such codes may impede the development of politically progressive worldviews regarding issues of gender, ethnicity and equality; the stereotyping involved may also indoctrinate children into attitudes at odds with the politically correct surface content of many shows. These aspects of children’s television are one reason why ‘the widely supported idea that children’s programmes are a good thing, beneficial to society’ 3 deserves scrutiny. The motivations and effects of such television are likely to be considerably more complex.
