TELEVISION
Battle for the pre-school viewer
Mike Sparrow
A new victim has fallen prey to the Powermanias lurking in television — the Pre-school child. He is readily geared to Openly receiving stimuli from left, right and Televison Centre. Unlike the Parent, play-group organiser or nursery teacher, the television educator operates on a one-way system, and the potential dangers of authoritarian television become more evident. The weekly transmission of the American import programme Sesame Street on London Weekend and Grampian has served to revitalise prospective fears and delights.
The street called ' Sesame ' is one of old buildings, tenements with dustbins outside, With ornate doors, cracked steps, and decaying stucco: rather like Ladbroke Grove with a few transatlantic additions like a US Mail box and a candy store. The four adult presenters and various children living there are carefully graded so that an equal racial balance is constant. These humans, though, usually just preserve the social status quo; the actual teaching is Presented in the main by felt-faced Puppets, cartoon stories and jingles, while entertainment is maintained by .1iirger and generally woollier monster puppets. The techniques are often self-confessed Madison Avenue: after a tale of Wanda the Witch who washes her wig on a wintry Wednesday with water from a well, we are told: "This Witch Story came to you courtesy of the letter 'W '." The Programme is screened for an hour, uninterrupted by commercial breaks ostensibly to maintain 'interest, also Perhaps to ensure that the glibness of the Programme is not compared with the glibness of the advertisements. Some ideas .are brilliant; and the speed and inbuilt energy are magnetic.
However, at a press preview of the Programme the queston was raised whether at was selling not only Education but also the American Way of Life. Though it smacks of British paranoid insularity, the query is justified when one considers the revelation of Dr Ed Palmer, the enthusiastic and buoyant leader of the Sesame Street research team, that the programme Is being used in Japan to teach mature students English. The cross-culture difficulties are of importance, not so much because of the slight vocabulary changes words like 'trash,' elevator,' and Cookie' are more familiar to children than we'd like to admit, because of the significant amount of American product that is already screened here — but because the basic policies of children's television here and in the US would appear to be fundamentally different. Before the miraculous arrival of Sesame Street, American children were subjected to a more or less continuous flow of wallpaper television, comprising mostly cartoons, crime series, and commercials. Monica Sims, Head of BBC Children's Programmes, has said: "In all programmes we make for British children we set out to discourage passive box-watching; our aim is to provide an imaginative and intellectual stimulus and to encourage creativity and activity."
The BBC decided against showing Sesame Street 'largely because it felt its own programmes were better suited to the needs of British children. There was a ready antidote to this American two-yearold: the tried and tested Play School, which had been running since 1964. This programme has also met with considerable international success — it has just been bought, ironically enough, by an American network station — though it is exported in 'kit' form, the film and scripts being supplied, the import country being responsible for production and presentation. Where Sesame Streets sets out specifically to educate the under-privileged child, Play School aims primarily to entertain him — education is a semiconscious subtle, sideline. Carol Chell, one of the presenters, described the programme as "purely entertainment, in the broadest sense. It's not didactic. If it happens to be educative during a child's enjoyment, that's marvellous, and we do hope that happens, but it isn't the purpose of the programme." It is reality-based, and Ann Reay, one of the producers, believes "it serves to help the child in its discovery of the world around it — the real things he must come to terms with."
Well and good: but the problem is that it is all so unutterably twee. While it escapes the choking nausea of some other children's programmes, it is nonetheless horribly restricted by its own cosiness. The presenters have, thankfully, no readymade glib answers about programme policy — indeed they are refreshingly spontaneous, but their indulgences when talking about the toys and pets they use hover towards the over-saccharined. They have the tower block liberally 'in mind, but it is more akin to the vicarage garden. Both Play School and Sesame Street go aground on the rocks of the middle classes they both pretend to avoid: the English conservative, self-satisfied and dangerously undemonstrative; the American conservative, paranoid and dangerously demonstrative.
It is because of these middle-class rocks, though, that both programmes are judged in terms of what each is doing for the preschool child. Maurice Plascoe, Media Advisor for Schools Council, while casting aspersions on the twee aspects of Play School believed nevertheless that "what it is trying to do is educatively more valuable." While the programme excludes didacticism, it does encourage a child to think for itself and formulate ideas, and brings about, in the words of Johnny Ball, one of the presenters, " a broadening of mind, an awareness of everyday situations and objects." The problem with the more precise content fed out by the repetitions
of Sesame Street is that the numbers one to ten, or the alphabet, are in themselves useless pieces of information, and while the programme does attempt to attach these facts to specific objects or words, there is always the danger that they could be learnt as detached entities. Plascoe believes that for the pre-school child, learning basic concepts in music such as rhythm and pitch — which are not easy to grasp, is more valuable and more suitable subject matter for television teaching, than the ABC, An observer reporting on a child watching a Play School item on cats told of the child leaving the room and forgetting all about the programme: he had gone to search out the tormented feline family to study the animal's habits for himself. A child, having watched a Sesame Street item on different shapes, tore downstairs to announce, "Mummy, my bed's a rectangle!" Television education perhaps always needs supplementing.
Play School's success lies in its studio spontaneity and its refreshing honesty. While a parochial reaction to Sesame Street's tailor-made glibness could be justified, it would be foolish to deny that the programme has more zest about it than most children's television fare to date. It would have been absurd had it not been shown in this country, and one hopes its screen time will be extended. The ball ultimately rests, though, in the court of Auntie BBC. She has an infinite capacity for absorbing influences into her own bosom, while maintaining a benign smile. She coped very well with the onslaught of pirate radio, and doubtless she is working on what to do about Sesame Street.
Previous page
