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Adults can be patronizing about children but children are totally clued up about what is going on in the world. But they are also children and they love to escape into a fantasy world. You can‘t have an adult telling kids what they want. Adults don‘t always know what is perceived by kids. Knowing the audience means getting out there and meeting the audience. It is important to do that to shape our programmes. (Producer, Interview, March 2009)

This chapter, the first of two drawn from my fieldwork research, considers the construction of the imagined audience in the discourse and working practices of staff at BBC Scotland Children‘s Department. The rationale for this chapter is that the issue of ‗knowing the audience‘ emerged as a key discourse of the Department, articulated not only in interview but in myriad working practices: questions of how to address, how to frame, how to serve, how to recruit and how to understand, engage and inspire the children‘s audience were raised and grappled with on an on-going daily basis at meetings and in decision-making. At its simplest, this issue of audience might be observed in a producer asking, ―Will our audience like that?‖

when looking at a prototype design (Field journal, September 2009) but could also be discerned in the full range of working practices. For example, the use of a low camera-position, used for much preschool filming, when questioned, was justified as an attempt to replicate a toddler‘s visual perspective. ―Why do you replicate a

toddler‘s perspective?‖ I asked; ―Because that‘s how our audience see their world‖

came the answer (CBeebies Producer, Field journal, May 2009). While such

subjective, point-of-view (POV) replication may seem an obvious visual strategy, it is when looking at preschool content from another context or era that one realises that even obvious or seemingly common-sense strategies are convention only: this chapter unpicks some of the assumptions and conventions that underlie production practice to consider how the audience is constructed by producers.

So striking is the Department‘s focus on issues of audience that it could be treated as a stand-alone topic. However, in reviewing my fieldwork journals and my

interview materials, it became apparent to me that questions of audience were fully entwined with another key discourse of children‘s television: that of the importance of UK-originated content. So inextricable are the two discourses that one seems to predicate the other. This is surely because, in a BBC Children‘s production context, the imagined audience is simultaneously a UK and a public service audience. One does not, after all, find the same intrinsic value expected of locally-produced content in a US – and therefore predominantly commercial – context (as illustrated in Dale Kunkel‘s 1993 essay on ‗Policy and the Future of [US] Children‘s Television‘). That serving the UK audience is achieved best through UK-originated content would seem to be a taken-for-granted assumption of BBC Children‘s production staff, and this is also enshrined in the current regulation of UK PSB, as shown in Chapter Three. Great validity is therefore claimed by UK producers – especially PSB producers - in their ability to represent and serve the UK children‘s audience through UK content, as I discuss throughout this chapter. The focus on a UK audience made by BBC producers does not preclude the sale of BBC children‘s products to other territories however, nor prevent the co-production of content with other non-UK broadcasters. Indeed, although independent UK producers reliant on investment and sales from outside the UK market might question the extent to which content should reflect its UK-origins, there appears to be an

industry-wide acceptance of the essential validity of UK-originated content as good for UK children, and widespread conflation of the terms ‗PSB‘ and ‗UK-originated‘

or ‗UK-produced‘ content.

Key concepts and questions

The material analysed here is taken mostly from interview and participant

observation of BBC Scotland Children‘s Department staff (in which I include those working on a freelance contractual basis), but it also includes material from

independent producers based in Scotland who were producing content for the BBC, and from children‘s television production personnel based in other parts of the UK.

My interviews are drawn from a diverse range of production roles – script-writer, researcher, runner, developer, director, editor, producer (at all designated BBC levels whether assistant-producer, producer, series producer or executive producer)

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– but all are referred to throughout as producer, as explained in my methods

chapter, with the exception of some executive roles wherein attribution is necessary for meaningful understanding of the material.

In relation to the construction of the audience, in interview I explored two key concepts that arose consistently in my participant observation, sometimes taking further ideas that had already been expressed by producers and sometimes

interrogating aspects that had not previously been articulated aloud. The first of the concepts centred on the idea of ―Who is your audience?‖ and the second on the idea of ―What is your relationship to the audience?‖. These concepts did not necessarily translate as bald, direct questions however and so were framed in various ways. So in saying, ―Tell me about your audience‖, or, ―Who is this show aimed at?‘ or, ―What do you think about your audience?‖ or, ―Why might your audience like this?‖

interviewees were asked – by way of description and definition - about their

understanding of the specificity of child audiences. The second concept – that of the producer‘s relationship to that audience - could be framed around a specific text or production role (―How do you cast participants for Raven?‖) but may also be framed as relevant to institution or brand (―What is distinctive about CBeebies content from an audience perspective?‖).

Even when the question was more esoteric or conceptual in framing (―What is CBBC‘s relationship to its audience?‘), interviewees generally brought concrete examples to bear in their responses (i.e. examples drawn from their personal experience or role in production). The questions often became a useful way to explore how personal decision-making related to the concept of audience and of public service responsibility to that audience. In this respect, the general tenor of my interview responses is different to that of Buckingham et al. (1999), who found that respondents used the particularity of their individual experience to generalise outwards (147-148): my research respondents tended to use the general in order to reflect inwards. In asking these questions, and indeed in presenting and evaluating the responses in a qualitative sense, I have adopted an approach consistent with that of Born (2004) and Burns (1977) in that it is not my intention to ‗test‘ the validity or accuracy of the producers‘ beliefs but to treat them as valid expressions of

perception. What I intend to do is to identify the constructions made of the audience and their implications for the nature and form of PSB produced by the Department.

In setting the parameters of the aim and scope of both my fieldwork chapters, I have found useful the overview of production studies provided by John Corner in his Critical Ideas in Television Studies (1999: 70-79). Corner notes the importance of the production phase thus: ―It is a moment in a process but it is the moment of formation and this gives it a primacy‖ (70), and advocates a mixed methods approach to production research, similar to that adopted here. However, Corner considers participant observation as a means of gathering primary evidence, but interview as a means of gathering secondary evidence:

The extensive use of interviews to gain a level of secondary data and the methods of observational fieldwork (including where appropriate participant observation) to gain primary material are key procedures here, raising their own problems of implementation and of essential validity. (70)

I have covered the questions of implementation and validity in my methodology chapter (Chapter Two) but I wish to reiterate here, that, in this research, I am treating my interviews with production personnel as primary evidence of how producers think about their audience – in as much as verbal communications can ever be considered primary evidence of interior thought. This accords with my desire to explore the ideas producers had about the children‘s audience, whether expressed in an individual or corporate sense.

Where most appropriate in Part Two of this thesis, I have divided my

research findings according to the two BBC Children‘s brands, CBeebies and CBBC.

Producing for these brands is, by and large, clearly delineated in the BBC Scotland Children‘s Department and so it makes sense for this chapter to present producers‘

ideas about their audience and their relationship to that audience, relative to brand.

The remainder of this chapter is divided in two roughly equal parts therefore between CBeebies and CBBC. At the end of the chapter I present a brief conclusion which draws together the themes that exist across both brands.

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CBeebies

Cursory analysis of the CBeebies brand immediately suggests an overarching corporate construction of the audience. One only needs to hear the CBeebies

marketing hook of ―learning through play in a consistently safe environment‖ (BBC 2011) to understand that educational and entertainment aspects are key to the brand and that the audience is conceptualised as being one for whom these aspects are blurred. That the line between education and entertainment is so easily blurred may suggest a construction of the audience as naïve or impressionable and this supports a further element of the corporate construction – that this audience is vulnerable and must (therefore) be kept ―safe‖. Bearing in mind this corporate construction, I wish to examine its ineffable or hidden aspects as assumed by producers of CBeebies texts.

For most CBeebies production staff in the Department, the first response to my request to, ―Tell me about the CBeebies audience‖, was met with a construction very similar to that of the corporate brand:

LW: Tell me about the CBeebies audience…

P [Producer]: They are the future. They are enthusiastic. They want to watch and learn. They are longing for good quality content and revel in it. Older audiences are more cynical and think, ‗I can‘t be bothered‘ or, ‗I don‘t want to watch that‘. The CBeebies audience just lap it up and enjoy. That is a huge privilege because we have the best audience ever. (CBeebies Producer, Interview, June 2009)

What I find interesting here is that as well as the institutional construction of an audience learning through play (―They want to watch and learn/[they] revel in it/

[they] lap it up and enjoy‖) there is also the construction of the audience as ―the future‖ and as not only different, but ―the best‖ audiences for reasons of their enthusiasm and willing engagement. I wish to explore these two concepts further.

Children as the future

The construction of children as ―the future‖ is a salient feature in many discourses of childhood, famously iterated in the trite lyrics of Whitney Houston‘s 1985 anthem,

‗Greatest Love of All‘.²² Here the construction is given a nuanced inflection as the producer suggests the preschool audience to be ―the future‖ in two distinct senses:

the future of society and also the future of the television audience itself.

The first sense – children as the future of society - fits well with the

construction of audience as public or citizens because both constructions look to the child as both the inheritor and progenitor of a civilised society; it is the ―child as citizen‖ construction that Buckingham et al. identified as a prevalent discourse (1999:149). Edelman (2004) argues that such construction is so deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious of society as to be effectively beyond challenge, yet he questions the political utilization of the child as ―the emblem of futurity‘s

unquestioned value‖ (4) and ―the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention‖ (3). Taken along with Lauren Berlant‘s ―theory of infantile citizenship‖ (1997), however, in which ―the [infant] citizen form figures a space of possibility that transcends the fractures and hierarchies of national life‖ (27), the construction and inculcation of children as active citizens and a future public can be seen as the ultimate goal within the

ideological ambit of a self-perpetuating society: it is a logical aspiration for children‘s PSB and especially for a preschool brand that constructs its audience as

impressionable.

22 I believe the children are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way Show them all the beauty they possess inside Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

Let the children‟s laughter remind us how we used to be

Words and Music by Michael Masser and Linda Creed. Golden Torch Music Corp. (ASCAP) Gold Horizon Music Corp. (BMI 1985)

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The second sense – that of children as the future of the television audience – combines both the audience as public model with the audience as consumer model, because it rests on ideas of brand loyalty and discerning consumer choice. In this way too, the sense of children as the future of the television audience squares the difficulty of constructing children as either consumers or public, by reinforcing PSB‘s role in teaching children how to be discerning or how to appreciate quality programming. This was emphasised at a BBC in-house presentation whereby the Children‘s Department outlined their work to the rest of the BBC Scotland staff at PQ. Simon Parsons‘s opening statement, outlining the importance of children‘s PSB, was that ―We are guaranteeing audiences for the future‖. This was then followed by a clear inference that the decline in what might be termed the ‗post-Children‘s‘

audience (and especially the 18 to 25 demographic sought after by BBC Three) was neither the fault nor problem of Children‘s production: ―And then we hand them over to you and it‘s up to you to keep them and look after them‖ (Field journal, February 2009). I find the way that BBC brand loyalty was thus used to align

different and perhaps antithetical constructions of the audience thought-provoking.

Guaranteeing audiences (and ratings) for the future would give the BBC an edge over commercial competition – no other broadcaster offers content for all stages of the life course under a single corporate brand - but it is framed as a legitimate aspiration of the public service broadcaster because of the enduring understanding of PSB as beneficial in its educative function:

Teaching ‗how to listen‘, ‗how to appreciate‘, is of paramount importance.

This, in fact is the keynote of [children‘s PSB]. It is to send the children to read, listen or see for themselves and their ever-increasing pleasures and happiness. (Corbett Smith, 1924, quoted in Oswell 2002: 33)

In this way too, educational and entertainment imperatives can be aligned together because teaching children ―how to appreciate‖ and how to be discerning in their entertainment consumption and choices is also a ‗public service‘.

Best of audiences: enthusiastic participation

The notion of the CBeebies audience as not only better but ―the best‖ of audiences is also interesting. In continuing to analyse producer interviews in the preschool

sector, one is able to pick out a thread of ideas as to why the CBeebies preschool audience may be perceived as ―the best audience‖:

The audience response is not just good but ‗WOW!‘ off the scale. [They are]

completely enraptured and they are doing the actions. They are taking everything in and seeing and believing. (CBeebies Producer, Interview, June 2009)

There is the inference that this audience has the ability to be fully immersed and engaged in the text and that their enthusiastic responses are without inhibition (―enraptured/doing the actions‖). This perception of the audience as especially participative and enthusiastic would seem to be key in claiming the CBeebies audience as the best of audiences. The producer supported the statement by reference to parental experience of a child viewing Waybuloo , but was quick to back up such anecdotal evidence with observation of the preschool audience in another spectatorship context: preschool television-based theatre shows Milkshake on Tour; CBeebies on Tour; LazyTown Live! ; and Playhouse Disney: Live! . The systematic attendance of these preschool theatre shows had previously been suggested to offer multiple benefits for CBeebies staff in that it offered the opportunity to ―watch the audience‖ as well as to ―see what the competition is doing‖ (CBeebies Producer, Field journal, June 2009). Staff who attended the shows would report back their experiences to colleagues. Discussion frequently centred on the level of participation or interactivity offered by the show and on the socio-economic class of the families observed to be attending.

The notion of participation or interactivity can be linked to the construction of the audience as an especially receptive one, able to be fully immersed within the text (Palmer 1986). This immersive and joyful quality, which I might associate with the Romantic construction of the ‗laughing child‘, is believed to inhere in the preschool audience itself rather than in the medium or platform of delivery, and may therefore suggest a ‗timeless‘ aspect of this particular construction of childhood:

LW: Has the preschool audience changed over the last 20 years?

P: I think kids are kids but they have so many more choices and the means of consumption has changed.

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LW: Is TV a special medium?

P: I agree to a certain extent but it is my responsibility to get across other platforms [online gaming and interactive content had been discussed].

LW: But why television as public service then?

P: I think the BBC is so iconic in its association with PSB. The public know it is in ALL our values. (CBeebies Producer, Interview, June 2009)

This exchange speaks to both my questions of defining the audience and of the producer‘s relationship to the audience. Here there is the inference that members of the CBeebies audience do not themselves discriminate between platforms; to a joyful and curious audience all platforms are equally novel, and to an enthusiastic audience all platforms are captivating. But with that participation comes adult responsibility for facilitating such engagement in the face of commercial competition (―it is my responsibility to get across other platforms‖) but without exploiting the child‘s propensity for such immersion or engagement – i.e. we return back to the CBeebies brand identity that such engagement takes place in ―a consistently safe

environment‖ (BBC 2011).

The Vulnerable Audience

The construction of the audience as vulnerable or impressionable (―taking

everything in and seeing and believing‖) is a traditional one in discourses around children‘s television, especially so in respect of the preschool audience who are deemed vulnerable with regard to commercial exploitation; potentially imitative behaviours; and, though a more nebulous category, various ideological or moral

‗messages‘ (e.g. messages around race, gender, sex, faith or politics). Much of the US research into children‘s television is around content analyses of children‘s texts in appraisal of their ideological content (e.g. those stored at the Annenberg Public Policy Centre, University of Pennsylvania) but UK research has not favoured this approach, possibly revealing the element of trust that is present in children‘s public service programming in the UK. In view of this trust and of the perceived ‗seeing is believing‘ quality of the CBeebies audience, several of my interviewees naturally led on to some of the practical demands of preschool programme-making when

discussing their relationship to the audience; editorial staff, in particular, pointed out