II.

The 1950s and Commercial Television

In the early 1950s, programmes were transmitted live from one small studio using four cameras, and simple factual magazines and entertainment magazines such as Whirligig rubbed shoulders once a week with ambitious drama serials such as The Railway Children, with a repeat performed live again on Sundays. Children were encouraged to join in games and competitions and All Your Own demonstrated their skills and achievements.

For pre-school children, the Head of Children’s Programmes at the BBC, Freda Lingstrom, devised the daily series Watch with Mother which used puppets and simple animation in a coherent mixture of entertainment and information. Directed at different aspects of a young child’s life, it involved action games and songs, imaginative fantasy, and learning about nature and family relationships. To critics who disapproved of television for children under the age of five, Lingstrom maintained that, since even impressionable two-year-olds were fascinated by television, they deserved their own programmes as much as any other viewers. Techniques in the 1950s may have been comparatively primitive, but some of those early programmes still work their magic with children today, as reissues of Andy Pandy and the remake in colour of Bill and Ben The Flowerpot Men in 2001 have proved. Crackerjack, with its slapstick comedy and banana skin jokes, began its long run in 1955.

Until 1955 the BBC was the only provider of television in the United Kingdom, but the coming of commercial television brought competition for all programmes, including those for children. The Independent Television (ITV) companies bought popular American Westerns and adventure serials, such as Lassie, shows that attracted large children’s audiences, as did the British-made Adventures of Robin Hood. The ITV schedule varied from region to region, but, as with the BBC, children’s programmes were usually transmitted after school and provided a gradual build-up of viewers until the early evening news. Financial investment in off-peak programming has always been low, and, although children’s programmes often cost more than programmes for adults because of their high visual content, budgets have always been restricted. Commercials between programmes on ITV are carefully monitored for suitability, but their costly production values sometimes expose the poverty of some of the children’s programmes they punctuate. Animated series, films, and dramas are expensive to make, and purchased material from the United States and Japan was used to supplement original home-grown programming by both the BBC and ITV. Blue Peter, still popular in 2002, began its life in 1958 with a weekly 15-minute slot.