The golden age of the Teletubbies is over. Children’s television is in crisis and algorithms are giving millions of young minds their daily fix.
On a recent wet afternoon in a café, I plopped my tired three-year-old daughter on a sofa, searched for “Bluey” on YouTube Kids on my phone, and left her to watch a few episodes of the joyous Australian cartoon about a family of cattle dogs.
A rookie error. Soon I could hear alarming squeaks — not a sound Aussie heeler dogs ever make. Playing on screen was a video of a real-life hamster stuck in some kind of papier-mâché hellscape where prison sirens blared out every time the hamster escaped. Bluey this was not.
It wasn’t the first time one of my children had been sucked into the vortex of the YouTube algorithm. Other unchosen content they have been fed recently includes weird fantasy mash-ups involving Paw Patrol, Frozen and co; clips of children opening endless presents (wildly popular); and all manner of cats doing strange things.
We’ve got off lightly. Other parents have encountered unseemly things being done to Peppa Pig and pals. In my ranking of the streamers and other screen-childcare providers, YouTube sits firmly at the bottom.
The problem is, children love it — and they no longer love traditional television. A recent Ofcom report found viewers aged 4-15 watched just 25 minutes a day of public service broadcast channels in 2021, down from 69 minutes a decade earlier. Astonishingly, children aged 7-16 years watch YouTube every day for two hours on average. So what does this mean for children and children’s television? How worried should parents be that kids are spending such a chunk of their childhood on YouTube?
“Anything you present to preschoolers will educate them because their brains are so malleable. The big issue is making sure you don’t present them with something that’s moulding them in a bad way,” says Greg Childs, the director of the Children’s Media Foundation. I’m confident which category the tortured hamster fits into — and I’m one of many parents struggling with the YouTube minefield.
Unlike my children, I was brought up on a healthy, BBC-curated diet of The Magic Roundabout, Blue Peter, The Borrowers and ChuckleVision (Does Teletubbies as a student count?). Controlling what we watched wasn’t an issue: what was available was largely educational and entertaining.
“We have a long tradition of creating some of the best and most valuable kids’ content in the world and the BBC’s children’s programming is a jewel in its crown,” says Faraz Osman, a television producer and the chairman of Bafta’s children’s advisory committee. “But that’s increasingly under threat.”
Mainly because children don’t watch television. Only one in three 4-6 year olds watch at least 15 minutes of CBeebies on a TV set every week. And that viewing time decreases further as they get older and gain mastery of other household screens. Partly as a result, CBBC will go digital-only, just a click away from everything else the internet has to offer. CITV, ITV’s children’s channel, also switches to its digital-only platform, ITVX, in the autumn.
Indeed all the traditional commercial broadcasters are making fewer children’s programmes. “All of which should worry parents and carers who want their children to grow up with great content that reflects and represents our British culture and values,” Osman says.
None of this is helped by a government decision last year to quietly close the Young Audiences Content Fund, a £44 million ($88 million) pot of money that had helped broadcasters such as C5 and ITV to make programmes to compete with YouTube and new streaming services. These broadcasters had already cut spending on original children’s content after the 2006 ban on advertising junk food to children reduced their revenue. “The money put into children’s content has fallen off a cliff,” Childs says. “The BBC is left as the sole commissioner, which isn’t good, because competition creates creativity.”
The BBC is still seen as the gold standard, yet you can find high-quality shows even on YouTube. Cosmic Kids Yoga, which takes children through yoga moves while telling them a story, is really well done. YouTube can also be a creative pathway for amateurs to break into the industry. Both of YouTube’s children’s channels ChuChu and Little Baby Bum were started by parents making videos for their young children. Now these pet projects are among the most popular YouTube channels in the world. ChuChu has 62 million subscribers; Little Baby Bum has 42 million. Collectively their clips have been watched 83 billion times.
Unfortunately — at least for parents — their content can best be summed up as unpalatable. Much of it is inane reworkings of nursery rhymes with lines such as: “C’mon let’s dance to the tune. Work out is a boon.” The computer-generated animation is bad, children’s heads are uniformly outsized, the music is brash, the gender roles painful to watch. The only upside is that the characters are multicultural.
For children, these videos are like crack. To hit “off” on these clips is a surefire way to unleash my daughter’s and even my 18-month-old son’s inner banshees. There’s no point in offering them something nourishing to watch instead, such as BBC’s Numberblocks. It’s like suggesting they watch a black-and-white silent film after they’ve got a taste for colour TV.
You’re fighting strong forces, Osman says, because the main motivation of YouTube and the like is to keep viewers of all ages watching. “Addiction is obviously a strong word, but it’s a word I use — the algorithm is designed to hold attention for as long as possible.” YouTube analytics knows exactly the point at which viewers stop watching — which gives the media brands behind these channels the tools to create clips that children won’t turn off.
It’s a very different picture from how a traditional piece of animated pre-school programming, such as the BBC’s Charlie and Lola or In the Night Garden, is created. These shows run the gamut of educational consultants, speech and language therapists and focus groups before they’re made. It can cost about £1.5 million to make a series of 52 seven-minute episodes.
YouTube’s offering is a Wild West in comparison. “We are concerned about the lack of regulation,” Childs says. The YouTube Kids app was designed to stop inappropriate content being shown to youngsters but it’s “not perfect”, he adds. Nasty stuff still gets through, and often older children won’t use it because it has “kids” in the title. YouTube says its main platform is not for the under 13s. “We built YouTube Kids to create a safer environment for kids. Videos available are determined by a mix of algorithmic filtering, user input and human review. We empower parents to control what content their child can and cannot see,” a spokesman says.
Streaming platforms are at least creating some quality programmes to rival the BBC’s. They aren’t required to create good children’s television, but they know the value of it. Netflix bought the rights to Roald Dahl’s works for £370 million, its most expensive content deal to date. I signed up to Apple TV+ for Gary Oldman and Slow Horses but I’m staying there for Lovely Little Farm because who wants to be the parent who cancels the subscription to their child’s favourite show? The streamer I will 100 per cent be paying for for the next decade is Disney+, largely because it is the primary home of Bluey (although early episodes are also avaliable on YouTube and iPlayer).
Created by the Australian Joe Brumm in a co-production with BBC studios, Bluey is the best thing on children’s television. The canine cartoon’s reach is enormous: since it was first broadcast here two years ago, Bluey has won an Emmy, spawned a stage show, a No 1 album and is shown in more than 60 countries. Podcasts dissect it, academics ponder its influence, and actor fans including Natalie Portman and Lin-Manuel Miranda even make guest star appearances.
A quick primer on its greatness: Bluey observes regular childhood events — doing a handstand, being left out from a game — with uncanny insight. Family, death, friendship and parenting are all handled with subtlety and intelligence. The dad (Bandit) is an idol; Mum (Chilli) is a total sasspot. Together they’re a recognisable couple, still in love, who parent with compassion while making mistakes. And it’s never earnest — dry humour and frankness underpin the series.
Later this month comes the next Bluey instalment. A second album, Dance Mode, is guaranteed to be the soundtrack of summer for millions of families. “Bluey is unique in that I’m not constrained by a genre of music,” says the composer Joff Bush, 37, from his studio in Brisbane. In one episode Bluey and her sister, Bingo, take turns licking ice cream while waltzing to Tchaikovsky. In another, Bach’s Prelude in F sharp tracks a parent squabble and eventual make-up. This approach, Bush says, is like “putting caviar on ice cream, mixing the domestic and sublime”. Which is Bluey in a nutshell — small in scope, big in feel.
It all adds up to screen time without any of the usual parental guilt — as long as YouTube’s algorithm, the bane of every parent’s life, doesn’t get in the way.
Bluey: Dance Mode is released on Friday
Shows you’ll be happy to let your children watch
Alphablocks/ Numberblocks
A saviour to parents when schools shut in lockdown, these bright and fun spelling and counting shows are still wildly successful. Despite being the first formal, overtly “educational” commissions from the BBC, according to Greg Childs, director of the Children’s Media Foundation, they are lapped up by young children. It’s similar to having a first-rate teacher available on demand 24/7 in your home. Now there’s a colour version . . . Colourblocks.
Tumble Leaf
A stop-motion animation about a blue fox named Fig and his mates that was one of the first three original children’s shows Amazon made, in a bid to prove it could do kids too. It’s soothing, gently paced and very pleasant, which might be why it has stayed under the radar. The streaming platform also has most of the Julia Donaldson adaptations, all of which are excellent. Especially the wiggly, squirmy Superworm.
Pip and Posy
The charming series based on the books that are published by Nosy Crow and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of The Gruffalo fame. Infinitely more enjoyable than the other show to emerge from C5 . . . the dreaded Peppa Pig.
Hilda
Netflix is investing hard in children’s content, presumably to try to keep up with Disney+. Hilda is a good bet. Based on the graphic novels by the British cartoonist Luke Pearson, it’s a funny and moving series about a spirited, blue-haired 11-year-old that comes with a dash of magical realism — unlike Netflix’s tooth-rotting show Gabby’s Dollhouse, which must be avoided at all costs.
JoJo and Gran Gran
The country’s first animated preschool show to feature a black family as the lead characters is a joy, following the adventures of a girl and her grandmother that’s based on the writer Laura Henry-Allain’s life. But you can’t have a list of preschool shows without Hey Duggee, even if it’s not a hidden gem. The canine scout leader who heads up an adventure camp of animal pals known as “squirrels” has a devoted parent and child following to rival Bluey’s. It’s wildly imaginative, clever and unique, with a bit of education slipped in — and it shows that the BBC has very much still got it.
Written by: Francesca Angelini
© The Times of London