Who cares about what children watch?

Following my previous post, here are some further comments on One Minute Wonders by my nephew, who's 11 years old, and who watched the first 15 minutes of Episode 1.

"It was really boring, because it didn't have anything interesting or funny about it. I would watch it but only if there was nothing else on, when there were ad breaks in other things. I thought it was for 8 year olds. The screen layout was a bit lame because it wasn't a full screen. The robot doing random things down the bottom was weird. There was a dinosaur crushing buildings and I didn't get what that was meant to be. The clips were all right; I learnt that Japanese people sleep a lot, not much else. The TV programmes I do like are like Scrubs and The Simpsons, Top Gear, Family Guy and Plus One."

Looking at One Minute Wonders and thinking about it, and hearing from boys who'd watched it, has reminded me once again about the low cultural status of children's TV. There's no shortage of pontification about other aspects of children's lives - their diet, their schooling, their access to exercise and fresh air - but the main focus of public debate about children and TV is risk, rather than value. Despite the fact that (according to Ofcom) children say TV is their favourite form of entertainment, children's TV is rarely, if ever, subjected to serious review. Adults who don't live with children (that's most of us) have no idea what's available for them to watch, and I suspect that most couldn't care less. The last time I tried to set up a public debate about the quality of children's media (Watch This! - a BFI/Barbican event in 2005 - see http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/conferences/watchthis/) most of the discussion was hi-jacked by arguments about certification and whether or not UK under-12s should have been allowed to watch Billy Elliott (that's on film - of course anyone can watch it when it's on stage). Although an interesting issue, that's hardly the central question about what children ought to be able to see.