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The Future of Australian Children’s TV


Australian Letters is a weekly newsletter from our Australia office. Register to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a correspondent for the Australian office.

On one of my first visits to Australia, as a child in the 1990s, I could not believe the extraordinary abundance of children’s programming on terrestrial television. (We’re not a cable family and have strict limits on “screen time” at home.)

While my parents dozed off and the cicadas chirped outside, my siblings and I closed the shutters and parked in front of the box. For hours (seemingly longer), we drank in typical Australian shows such as “Play School”, a show somewhere between the British “Blue Peter” and the classic play “Sesame”. Street” by PBS, albeit without tangles. “Bananas in pajamas”, a show about an eccentric six meter tall banana twins, is another favorite. (We’re a bit young for “Heartbreak High,” the Australian teen drama that rebooted for Netflix this year.)

“Bananas in pajamas” have never been as popular in the United States as they are at home. But other Australian hits have been amazingly successful in other parts of the world. “Skippy,” the 1960s show about ‘kangaroos’, was broadcast across the Commonwealth, while the beautiful, singing quartet of “The Wiggles” gave new meaning to “kid rock” “.

And now there’s “Bluey.” Series about a family of Australian herding dogs called “Blue Heelers” topped Nielsen’s streaming chart in August; Disney, to satisfy the audience’s need to yawn, even has a plan to “unblock” an episode from its streaming platform that it was previously made up by jokes about flatulence.

Children’s television in Australia far exceeds its weight. At its best it’s quirky and sometimes needy; it’s smart without preaching and thoughtful without sentimentality. “Bluey”, for example, score it seriously, based on serious classical inspirations: Tchaikovsky; “Carmen”; even Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”.

Programs have a clear record of providing representation in important places: The British show “Peppa Pig” may have recently made headlines for introducing a family of two mothers, but “Play School“Done in 2004. Later this year, “Bluey” will feature the first Deaf character, who speaks in sign language. And the Emmy-winning series “First Day” first aired in 2020, starring a transgender actor playing a transgender Sydney high school student.

In some cases, programs cannot take place outside of Australia: MaveriX,” about young Northern Territory motorcyclists, features a predominantly Aboriginal cast and is co-produced by Trisha Morton-Thomas, an Indigenous Australian woman from the state where the set film is shot. The show’s global rights were acquired by Netflix last year and are now available around the world.

What makes Australian television for children so good? For decades, Australia’s commercial free-to-air television networks were required to broadcast hundreds of hours of children’s programming each year, much of which was performed in Australia. This quota dates back to the 1980s, when Tony Morphett, a prominent Australian screenwriter who died in 2018, campaigned for greater funding and stricter quotes for Australian-produced shows and films. export.

Writing in the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s 1989 annual report, Morphett made a heated case for Australian-produced shows in which Australian actors can tell Australian stories with Australian accents. He dreams of a “multicultural” world “where we can have our own culture and enjoy the richness and diversity of hundreds of others,” he wrote.

Three decades later, the future of children’s television in Australia is still uncertain.

Those quotas were dropped by the Morrison government last year, and have led to a reduction in the production of locally produced children’s television in Australia. Commercial spending on children’s television productions fell from AU$25 million, or about $16 million, in the financial year ending 2019 to AU$3.6 million, or about $16 million. equivalent to $2.2 million, for the fiscal year ended last year.

ABC, the government-funded state broadcaster, used to target 50% of its children’s programming being conducted in Australia. As of 2017, that was down about 25 percent. It has no official obligation to make or show children’s television programming under its charter.

Why all these problems? Perhaps Morphett did the best. “This century began with the fact that we were no longer a colony,” he said. It could end with us becoming a colony again, this time a colony. “

And the enthusiasm with which global audiences have embraced Australia’s shows – of “Bluey”, of “Round the Twist”, even “The Wiggles” – speaks to the appetite that goes far beyond Australia’s borders.

Now the stories of the week.



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