The BBC by David Hendy

Author:David Hendy [Hendy, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

In this respect, children were taken just as seriously as everyone else: they were, after all, citizens in the making. When Andy Pandy first appeared on British screens in 1950, young viewers found it hard to tell whether this strange puppet, with its floppy hat, its baggy, striped jumpsuit, and its wide-eyed, slightly startled expression, was actually a boy or a girl. The clown-like androgyny was just as much part of its character as the all-too-visible strings that held it upright and gave it its endearingly jerky walk. Every Tuesday afternoon, Andy would play happily with Teddy and Looby Loo until a sing-song voice announced – as it always would – that it was ‘Time to go home, time to go home’, and Andy would wave goodbye before disappearing obediently into a little straw basket. Mary Adams, who had commissioned the programme, hoped children at home would respond enthusiastically to Andy’s invitations to join in ‘by clapping, stamping, sitting down, standing up and so forth’. Monica Sims, who would soon be joining the Children’s department, thought the key to Andy Pandy’s success was that all the movements and songs mirrored very precisely what an average three-year-old could do. Her new boss, and the woman who had designed Andy Pandy in the first place, was Freda Lingstrom. Every programme that Lingstrom went on to develop, Sims reckoned, was ‘designed very carefully to cover all aspects of a young child’s life’. ‘Bill and Ben was a fantasy …Rag, Tag and Bobtail was the sort of beginnings of natural history, The Woodentops were really about relationships within a family.’ The guiding philosophy had in fact been laid down by the BBC on the eve of Andy Pandy’s launch. Television’s ‘Children’s Hour’, it said, should always entertain and be liked. But it also needed to satisfy parents and educational professionals that it would foster children’s needs, not just their wants.49 The BBC saw no reason for denying children the same balanced diet of education, information and entertainment it offered the country’s grown-ups: they were to get a full service ‘in miniature’.

The approach could get a little nannyish. Throughout the early 1950s, and with the vigorous encouragement of the Postmaster-General, the Corporation imposed a so-called ‘Toddlers’ Truce’. Around six o’clock every weekday evening, television transmissions ceased for a period so that parents across the country could get their youngest children to bed. But even here, although the practice irritated programme makers, it spoke to a consistently held ethos about the benefits of rationing. In 1949, before the ‘Truce’ had even been formalised, Norman Collins had made his own heartfelt plea to the thousands of Britons who were now starting to buy new sets: ‘Please don’t let the children view too much. At least send the little beasts to bed when the time comes.’ At the BBC, even television’s most passionate advocates believed there would always be better – more active, more creative, more socially responsible – things to do than simply sit and watch the screen for hours on end.

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