There was a time when everybody watched Muffin the Mule dancing on a piano. There was a time when old Jack Hargreaves told everybody “How”. There was a time when everybody laughed when John Noakes said “And now it’s my turn!” on Blue Peter. A time when everybody watched Newsround, mesmerised by John Craven’s sweaters. There was a time when everybody watched Noel Edmonds running about on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on Saturday mornings. And when everybody knew Ant and Dec as just two actors on Byker Grove. There was a time, there was a time…

Now there are 28 “kids’ ” satellite channels, from Tiny Pop + 1 to Disney and the Cartoon Network and, though Channel 4 and ITV have all but given up on children’s TV, BBC1 still pumps it out, as does Five, though only for the under-sevens. When you came home from school, you only had to choose between Blue Peter and Magpie; now at 5pm on any given day, your children will be torn between Ben 10, The Latest Buzz, SpongeBob SquarePants, MI High, Pop Party and countless other shows. Kids? They’ve never had it so good.

Or maybe not. In the television industry, and increasingly beyond, there is now anxiety and even panic about the state of children’s television in Britain. Two lobby groups – Save Kids’ TV, and Voice of the Listener and Viewer (VLV) – are campaigning furiously to get the government to intervene. The Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (Pact), the independent producers’ professional body, is raising Downing Street petitions and bombarding MPs with letters. Ofcom, the industry regulator, has published a study showing a vertiginous decline in children’s programme-making. Debates are being held and dark prophecies are being issued about a total collapse of British children’s TV as we hand over the nation’s future to Disney Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network.

“I think we just don’t care,” says Anna Home, head of children’s programmes at the BBC from 1986 to 1997. “It’s bizarre at a time when we are lamenting the fate of our children. We don’t appear to care about children and the arts.”

“We don’t want to be the generation that, when we have retired and our grandchildren ask us what we did in television, has to tell them, ‘We got rid of children’s TV,’ ”says Laurence Bowen of Feelgood Fiction. “If we don’t respond to this crisis, that’s what we will be saying.” Bowen made two series of the multiple-award-winning children’s drama My Life as a Popat for ITV. The third series is on hold because ITV has pulled out of all investment in children’s productions.

“I’m very depressed about the whole situation,” says Anne Wood, one of the creators of Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. “I can’t see how things will ever recover.”

So what’s the problem? Is it really the big bedtime for kids’ TV? Well, children, once upon a time, a new satellite called the Astra 1A flew up high into the sky. It was 1989. The Berlin Wall came down and, two years later, Britain had multi-channel TV.

“The writing was on the wall as soon as multi-channel was launched,” says Nick Wilson, director of children’s programming at Five. The old terrestrial quartet – Five did not come along until 1997 – found themselves trapped in a competitive tornado. And the terrestrial broadcasters were PSBs – public-service broadcasters – which were subject to fiercer regulation than any of the satellite stations. Over time, this meant smaller audiences for the PSBs and ever greater pressure to free them from regulation. Children’s programming was an aspect of regulation. PSBs were expected to make and broadcast a certain number of hours for children. This was to prove a demanding requirement from the beginning. In the later 1950s, BBC children’s programming buckled almost fatally under competition from the new ITV, which boasted shows like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe. But apart from such wobbles, the regulated PSBs provided a benign environment in which a national industry grew and flourished. For at least a few decades our children’s TV could claim to be the best in the world. Only when Sesame Street came along in 1969 did we began to realise the Americans may be able to do it better. But until recently, a large home-grown industry remained intact – around 50 of Pact’s members are dedicated children’s-programme makers. Then it all started to go wrong. Channel 4, then ITV, stopped commissioning children’s TV – though ITV now claims to be planning some new commissions for its CITV channel.

“If those channels were to stop making British comedies and just buy in American shows, there would be an outcry,” says Anne Wood. “But because it’s children’s TV, nobody will say anything until it’s too late.”

The reasons are bleakly obvious – first, The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, Richard & Judy. What the money men perversely like to call the “opportunity costs” of children’s TV had rocketed because the post-school slot – called, equally perversely, “shoulder peak” – had suddenly become a big ratings zone. Big shows for big babies, or “adults” in advertising parlance, were needed. So by putting on TV for children, revenue opportunities were being missed.Secondly, last year, the “opportunity cost” rose even further when, as a result of an Ofcom study, advertising of food and drink products high in fat, sugar and salt during children’s programmes was banned. This cut the potential revenue from such slots by 10-15%. Thirdly, competing with original kids’ programming had become very expensive indeed. Disney might spend $1m on a half-hour children’s drama. If it really pushes the boat out, the BBC might spend that on an hour, occasionally. But, for shows aimed at seven-year-olds and over, Disney is the competition and you have to compete. Seven is the crucial age. At that point children start to make their own choices. They take over the TV zapper and head for the perfect dentistry of American kids’ dramas. As a result, channels like the BBC’s CBeebies, aimed at children up to 6, do well, but CBBC, for 6- to 12-year-olds, is forced to struggle against the US. “CBBC,” said one insider, “is terrified of Disney.”

Furthermore, UK broadcasters can buy in programmes fantastically cheaply for two reasons: profits have already been made in the States, and the companies often have associated merchandise they want to push in the UK. Nick Wilson says this latter incentive means it would, in theory, be possible to run an entire children’s channel using nothing but free content.

In the midst of this, the government, as if possessed of a sadistic desire to kick the industry when it was down, passed the 2003 Communications Act. This set up Ofcom to regulate the PSBs, but it also established three regulatory tiers. In a stroke of demonic genius, children’s television was put in tier three. This means largely voluntary regulation. The children’s production industry was suddenly massively exposed. How did this happen? Floella Benjamin, the children’s presenter, warned of what would come next, but nobody seemed to listen. “I think we all probably had our eye on the wrong ball at the time,” says Home sadly.

Then the final blow. The BBC did not get the licence-fee settlement it wanted, and announced a series of cuts. CBeebies and CBBC were to lose 10% in real terms over five years – taking their budget down from £110m to £98m. It was, everybody agrees, a dumb decision, a thoughtless accountant’s fix that ignored the changes in the business that had left the BBC as virtually a monopoly provider of home-grown children’s television. Challenged about the cuts at a VLV meeting, Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, said he would be “tracking performance carefully” to ensure quality didn’t suffer. “I think,” said one lobbyist, “he’s just waking up to the fact that this is an issue.”

The cuts have evoked a nightmare scenario for BBC children’s TV, made more threatening to some by the arrival of Liam Keelan as head of planning and scheduling for BBC1. He ran ITV daytime for a while. The fear is that he will be under too much pressure to deliver competitive daytime ratings, pressure that would inevitably focus on the post-school slot. What then might happen is that children’s TV is moved from BBC1. This will cut its audience and inevitably raise questions about the size of the budget. The scenario ends with the BBC providing little more than a desultory, underfunded service.

That may not happen, but, most believe, some sort of nightmare has already begun. The Ofcom report The Future of Children’s Television Programming, published in October and rushed out because of the crisis, described it in detail. The numbers were grim. Cartoons now account for 61% of all children’s TV, and only 17% of airtime was filled with UK-made shows. In fact, that 17% is wildly deceptive, as it includes repeats. The reality is that, in 2006, only 1% of the total hours of children’s shows being broadcast for the first time on a UK channel were made in Britain. Unsurprisingly, investment is plunging, especially in original drama production. People had begun to notice. Four-fifths of parents said public-service children’s broadcasting was a good thing, but fewer than half thought it was being well delivered.

The report provided irrefutable evidence that the crisis was real. It also galvanised the campaigners by asking for responses by December 20. It suggested five possible courses of action: do nothing, get the broadcasters to start a special fund, give tax credits as with the film industry, regulate and force compliance on the PSBs, or create a new public-service channel for children. In its submissions, Save Kids’ TV was going for a new “destination”, meaning a web-based TV channel. Pact was backing tax breaks as the fastest fix to save its beleaguered producers from going out of business.

Politically, it would seem, the campaigners must win. A recent Unicef report on childhood concluded that Britain was the worst-developed country in which to grow up. Child poverty is rising, educational standards are falling. In response, both leading parties launched inquiries into the condition of childhood. In December, Ed Balls, the secretary of state for children, schools and families, announced his 10-year children’s plan. Also in December, a debate in Westminster Hall about children’s TV brought wide support from MPs for the campaigners, and tentative though noncommittal support from Gerry Sutcliffe, the culture, media and sport secretary. Given that Mike Watts of Pact estimates its tax-breaks scheme would only cost the Treasury about £10m a year, it would seem saving our native industry would be cheap and politically virtuous.

But the deep question, beyond the money and politics, is not how it should be done but why. Is it so important we have home-grown children’s TV? Is children’s TV really a public good? You may recall Swap Shop or Muffin the Mule with fondness, but you may well have deeper, fonder memories of off-screen life, like building dams and blowing up Airfix kits with bangers (or maybe that was just me).

This may seem like a scorched-earth argument, but it has a good deal of serious support. The philosopher Roger Scruton has eloquently attacked the effect of television on childhood, and assiduously denied his two children access to TV at home. “Sam and Lucy Scruton,” he writes, “whose television-free childhood has few moments of light relief, find solace at the end of each day in Wonderland, the Argonauts or Narnia, and there is every sign that, cut off though they are from all communication with their peers, they are increasingly able to follow conversations about the Critique of Pure Reason, the origin of earthquakes and the physical impossibility of Spider-Man.”

This deep intuition that television is intrinsically bad for children has been backed up in recent years by some startling research. Questions about child-development issues inspired the American Academy of Pediatrics, in 1999, to explode a bomb under the whole pre-school TV industry by recommending no screen time of any kind – TV or computer – before the age of two. The Teletubbies, it seemed, were bad for you. Also in the US, Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington suggested strong links between certain types of TV shows – violent, rapidly edited – and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). In Britain the psychologist Dr Aric Sigman in his book Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives came up with a truly apocalyptic list of symptoms caused by excessive TV-watching, from loss of libido in adults to stunted brain development in children.

All of this has been challenged, often persuasively. For example, the correlation between ADHD and TV-watching may not mean that TV is to blame. Hyperactive children are frequently calmed by television and so may be more likely to be sat in front of the set for longer than other children. A correlation is not a cause. Furthermore, the rise in TV-watching has been accompanied by a rise in many new kinds of diagnoses like ADHD. We are looking more closely at people and finding them a mess. But they may have been as much of a mess before TV. Again, a correlation is not a cause.

Lisa Guernsey, an American writer with two small children, was so alarmed by the scare stories about the demons in the box that she set out to write a book about them. But her book Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children from Birth to Age Five, came to an unexpected conclusion. “The real question is: is TV-watching causing behavioral problems or are behavioral problems causing TV-watching? As long as we keep that question in our heads we can ask, ‘What do we really know?’ I came to the research thinking I would get more and more alarmed. In fact, I found myself becoming more reassured.”

The problem Guernsey had discovered was that, if anybody says anything remotely bad about TV, it is immediately inflated and exaggerated by the media, because there is nothing parts of the media like doing more than making people feel guilty, and there is a deep well of uncertainty and guilt about TV. Guernsey has now adopted a strategy of careful vetting of the screen time of her two children, aged three and five. It is all about the three Cs, she says: child, context and content.

But American TV guilt is different from British TV guilt. In America, the primary guilt is about education. All too aware of the multiple, brain-addling distractions available to their children, they become neurotic about educational content. Sesame Street is, for guilt-ridden Americans, the gold standard for children’s TV, with every second of screen time measured for educational content. As a result of this obsession, Anne Wood has been having difficulty selling her In the Night Garden in the US. Her previous Teletubbies is now classified as not educational, and Night Garden has fallen into the same trap. This is a silly, accountant’s view of education; Wood’s shows are aesthetically educational.

In contrast, British TV guilt is either about whether there should be any TV at all or whether there should be any American TV at all. Fear of America is a complex involving fear of cartoon violence, cheap exploitation, empty commercialism or – when channels like Disney show high-quality, expensive material – fear of cultural imperialism. A show like High School Musical, for example, can feel like an empty fantasy to parents brought up on the realism of Byker Grove and Grange Hill. Everybody I talked to in the business stressed the importance of shows that portrayed the world children knew rather than some bright, idealised America.

“Much of what is on Disney and Nickelodeon is excellent,” says Richard Deverell, controller of BBC Children’s since February. “The issue is that it’s not UK-produced, and children like to see their own worlds reflected. Of course, they love that glossy, perfect-teeth Disney drama, but they also like programmes that reflect their own lives and their own world as it is in the UK.”

Deverell is the chief bearer of the burden of British TV guilt. Apart from Nick Wilson at Five and a few British bits and pieces on the big American channels, he is now the only man with a proper UK children’s production budget. He plainly sees, though does not formally acknowledge, the perversity of having this budget cut at such a moment. The effects over the next five years are likely to be dramatic.

“I don’t believe in five years’ time we will be able to sustain the volume and quality of output we now have… I’m not currently convinced we can afford to maintain a live Saturday-morning show and a Sunday-afternoon drama. One of these will have to go. These are real choices.”

Big cuts have, in fact, already been imposed. Blue Peter is down to two shows a week and new dramas have been slashed. Deverell fiercely defends such moves. It is better to produce lower volume and higher quality, he says, than higher volume with poor production values. The resulting gaps are filled with repeats of these dramas. He says this has, in fact, improved CBBC ratings, but it is, of course, terrible news for the independent children’s drama producers who will find themselves out of work as a result. The BBC recently announced it had one new drama slot available. No fewer than 500 ideas were submitted; the producers are desperate.

The real, unstated point behind Deverell’s dash for quality is that, when it comes to 6- to 12-year-olds, he has to compete with Disney, and that means at least attempting to match its production values. But, even worse, he has to compete with the whole, vast culture of distraction we’ve created for our children.

This, ultimately, is the heart of the matter. The writer Russell T Davies, who so brilliantly revived Doctor Who, saw this when he pointed out that the children’s TV campaigners were living in a “bygone age”. The kids have moved on. Deverell’s real problem is that his age groupings – 0 to 6 for CBeebies and 6 to 12 for CBBC – are all wrong. Once they hit 7, gain control of the zapper and become fatally aware of what their peers are up to, children effectively enter a hyper-competitive world that will sustain them until they are 18 – or, possibly, 80. This is why the commercially driven Five has restricted itself to programmes for up to six-year-olds – Nick Wilson says the ratings drop-off after that is horrific – and why Deverell is so desperately protecting the production values of his shows. It is also why the BBC has started BBC Switch, a “cross-platform brand”, in an attempt to hold onto teenagers.

The great irony is that while British children’s TV is being cut to the bone, unimaginable billions are being poured into children’s entertainment, but only when the word “children’s” is replaced by the word “family”. Deverell isn’t allowed to make Doctor Who because it’s “family” entertainment and Hollywood doesn’t put real money into children’s films, but it puts billions into “family” films like The Golden Compass, The Lord of the Rings, Toy Story, etc. And then there are the computer games…

Anne Wood suggests this is not to do with childhood but with the global culture’s childishness. She is right. This childishness means that what are essentially children’s products can be sold to the entire age range. The audience for these big fantasy movies is everybody, because everybody is “family”.

Wood’s observation points to the real, though unconscious, motive of the campaign. It’s not about saving children’s TV at all, it’s about saving childhood. Global culture destroys childhood by making it indistinguishable from adulthood; the seven-year-old is distracted by the same things as the 40-year-old. The Japanese businessman has a Hello Kitty pen and the US broker an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars or Halo 3. To look back to an era before the culture of distraction took hold in the mid-to-late 1990s is to see an era when childhood was different. Muffin the Mule, Blue Peter or even Byker Grove meant something then because being a child meant something. After that, it meant only that, once you got screen control, you were initiated into the deeply distracted world. Being handed the zapper is a rite of passage, the new first communion.

In this sense, the campaigners face inevitable defeat. There will be no real children’s TV in the future because there will be no real children. But they’re right to go down fighting. They should win their battles knowing they will lose the war. The BBC should wake up to its responsibilities and increase, not decrease, its children’s budget. The Treasury should pay the paltry £10m for the tax break, and the beleaguered kids’ TV producers should get back to work. Because, children, there was a time…

Thinking out of the box

India Knight once thought kids’ TV made children stupid and fat. Her daughter’s special needs changed her mind

I used to be one of those priggish middle-class mothers who thought that letting small children watch television was the cultural equivalent of letting them hang out on street corners before their fifth birthday. If, 15 years ago, I ever let my older children watch Saturday-morning cartoons, or napped as they sat in front of Thomas the Tank Engine, I atoned with hours of energetic outdoor play. I really thought kids’ TV made children stupid, passive and fat.

I now believe that children’s television saved my daughter’s childhood. No, really. My daughter, Nell, was born with a heart condition and a genetic anomaly that means, among other things, that she has very severe palate problems. Aged nearly four, there are sounds her palate cannot physically make. When she was diagnosed, around four months old, we were told we would need to learn, and then teach her, Makaton, a form of sign language. This little piece of information, coming on top of a deluge of depressing (and frightening) diagnoses, was what tipped me over the edge, from “I can’t believe this is happening but I’ll deal with it” to “I want to lie down and cry and not get up.” But our speech therapist at Great Ormond Street said: “You want a programme called Something Special. It’s on CBeebies. Watch it as much as you can, and get DVDs if possible. You’ll be fine.”

She was right. Something Special is a programme for children with special needs, which also teaches its viewers Makaton vocabulary in a simple and organic way. If that makes it sound worthy but boring, nothing could be further from the truth. The programme is so funny, compelling and often so touching, it has become required watching not only for families such as mine, but for “normal” toddlers and small children. As a result, there are many children who know bits of Makaton, and the side effect of that is my little daughter’s signing is understood by more people than I’d ever have imagined — people who don’t officially know sign language.

My daughter took to signing like a duck to water: we sat her in front of Something Special, and away she went, picking up the signs with amazing speed and immediately incorporating them into everyday life. The adults around her took a while longer.

Allan Johnston, the programme’s producer and creator, is a genius, and Justin Fletcher, its incomparable presenter, is a friend to children and a hero to parents. But then everyone connected with the programme is impressive, as we discovered when Nell was asked to take part in a forthcoming episode of Something Special. I have worked in the media all my adult life, and am cynical enough to entertain no illusions about television and the individuals in it. Well, talk about a U-turn: every single person involved with Something Special is practically a saint, and I’ve seldom met a kinder, more conscientious and dedicated bunch of people. These are not ordinary people, and the aptly named Something Special, which doesn’t shout or blow its own trumpet, is not an ordinary programme.

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