05 July 2011
Posted in
TV
Richard Bevan reports from the BBC's Something For The Kids symposium, featuring Connal Orton
Over the past few years much has been said about the declining commitment of British broadcasters to children’s television production. With occasional exceptions from the commercial sector, it is mostly now left to the BBC to be the main producer of content for channels such as CBBC and CBeebies.
A recent symposium, ‘Something For The Kids’ run by the BBC writersroom and the University of Leeds, demonstrated the keenness and enthusiasm of writers to write for children. The event was so successful that extra room had to be found in the building to cater for attendees who came from a multitude of backgrounds, including journalism, creative writing and children’s books.
At the same time the event was a reality check for would-be children’s’ TV writers as they learned about the pressures on British producers in a market dominated by a plethora of digital channels offering internationally made product. Against this onslaught of ‘generic’ kids’ shows and channels devoted to cartoons, the BBC is still uniquely committed to making comedies and dramas for British children. Hopefully the department’s move to Salford’s Media City will see more investment and rejuvenation in this very important part of broadcasting.
After presenting an impressive showreel showcasing current and new programmes including Tracy Beaker, M.I. High, The Sparticle Mystery, Histories Horrible, Leonardo and the teenage comedy show Sadie J, the audience was then given the low-down on what CBBC is looking for in terms of content as Connal Orton, Executive Editor for CBBC, answered questions.
How should writers approach creating shows for kids as opposed to adults?
Connal Orton: Fundamentally, I don’t think there’s an enormous difference between writing for teens and writing for adults. They all involve telling stories that are relevant to that particular audience and can be understood and enjoyed by that audience. It’s the same thing, finding interesting and fascinating characters, compelling dramatic dilemmas and having some level of engaging mystery to it.
Should writers take into account the economic pressures facing producers and write material that has international appeal, rather than simply entertaining British audiences?
I wouldn’t say that the international thing is necessarily important, in fact in some senses I would suggest that writers shouldn’t think about that because producers know the market and how to put those deals together. I think sometimes when writers try to create something that is a bit more culturally transparent or international, it actually just feels a bit wishy-washy and rootless.
Broadcasters seem fixated with long running shows, but is there still space to write one-off stories in children’s TV?
There are points in the calendar when there are single films around Christmas, where there are ‘event’ things. There are other stories such as Combat Kids which was something that came out of CBBC this year. It was looking at kids on an army base and it was around a slighter wider strand that was across factual stuff as well. So there’s a will to do it and there are certain stories that should be told that don’t want to lend themselves to 13-part or 26-part series. But the economics mean that if you’re doing a single your costs per minute are going to be higher than for a series. The reality is we’ve always done longer runs of series and our audience, if they love something, they really love it and they want to watch more. They won’t feel cheated because you’ve given them a 26-part series instead of 26 singles.
Do writers have to be aware about how children are watching shows, such as dipping into a programme now and then?
The debate has gone back and forth about whether you can write a narrative arc across a series or not. It fell out of favour, and there was quite a chunk of time in kids’ TV where you absolutely had to write free-standing episodes. It was based on the view that children might not watch anything in order. But there’s a counter argument now, and in adult drama there’s been a real attempt to hold an audience by having shows stripped across a week. Schedulers no longer rule when we can watch stuff, but kids are savvy to all of that because often they aren’t watching TV in conventional ways.
So there’s little need to worry about how shows are consumed by kids – we can still write stories that have ongoing and serial strands?
In the industry we’ve stopped talking about making television, we make content. The reason for that is that most of our CBBC audience aren’t watching our content on a television. So they can find an episode if they want to watch an episode in order. And that definitely opens things up for the writer. We’ve never let go of the idea of a story arc throughout a series. With shows such as Tracy Beaker for instance we’ll always start and think ‘What’s the story arc in this series?’ and have a series arc even though we will have free-standing stories of the week in individual episodes. We are talking about having some shows that do have a proper arc and good old-fashioned hooks that mean the viewer can’t wait to get back to the next episode.
On the subject of whether the BBC will expand its brief regarding the age range for children’s shows, Connal admits that there are still no plans to make shows for the 13-16 audience – except within the family-based Saturday evening show slot.
To be honest, there are few opportunities to write teen material in the UK. I think in the US there’s more room to do it. They’re a little bit of a lost audience in British TV and I think everyone’s slightly aware of that - Skins and Hollyoaks excepted - and kind of recognise they want to do something. Every channel wants to hang on to them all the way through to the late teens but hasn’t quite worked out how to do it and, of course, stump up the money as well. The problem is that no-one has defined yet an identity that captures that audience.
Despite this limitation Connal believes that it’s sometimes important to be appealing to the 12-year-old and younger audience by having characters that are older.
If you look at some of the massively popular American shows, the girls in the centre of them are in their late teens, if not older. So the age bracket we have isn’t necessarily a block if you build up that older world around them in the right way. You have to be careful about the sort of stories that you tell, obviously. You’re not doing stuff about 16-year-olds going out and getting drunk and dating stories, etc.
Jo Combs, New Writing Development Manager at BBC Writersoom pointed out that Waterloo Road is extremely popular with teenage girls, and Connal believes children enjoy watching shows where the main characters are maturer.
It’s that aspirational thing again whereby kids like to identify with what older children may be dealing with, that kind of big brother or big sister thing. And I think it’s fair to say that children don’t often like to watch characters that are younger than themselves because they then feel that the show is definitely not aimed at them.
Would Grange Hill be commissioned today?
Yes, I think so. We are talking about that kind of show, and in some cases we do. We want a balance between the more broader as in entertainment shows and stuff that allows us to deal with issues. A show like Tracy Beaker has a lot of overlap with a show like Grange Hill in terms of being able to deal with the kind of social issues and things that you might describe in their broadest terms as being political, but looked at from a kid’s perspective. And that’s really important. If the shows that didn’t allow us to deal with that stuff weren’t in the schedule, we would all feel that they were missing and would do something about it.
Are international (mainly US) children’s shows influencing commissioning decisions in any way that UK writers should be aware of?
When I did a presentation some time ago and had Hannah Montana on a projection screen, they thought I was trying to induct them into some sort of evil cult. I think Hannah becomes a focus of that sort of criticism because it has been so overwhelmingly successful. There was a statistic which showed that if the audience that watched the show was a country it would be the fourth largest country in the world. And a lot of people feel like they want to go to war with that country!
Actually it may not be my favourite but I think a lot of those American shows do that stuff fantastically well, just as their adult comedies do. They are very polished and have a really clear sense of what they are and an ability to produce very high quality work across a high volume of episodes. What is interesting is that many of Britain’s down to earth kids’ shows featuring under dogs such as Tracy Beaker, wouldn’t get the thumbs up in the States. So for writers over here their trump card is still our very own landscape and culture.
Do recent developments with Torchwood (now co-produced by BBC Wales, BBC Worldwide and US network Starz) illustrate where British shows can develop internationally and could something similar happen with children’s content?
What’s important to us and what is central to CBBC is about championing domestic production and making sure we make shows here that are for the audience here and are about the audience here. It’s absolutely fine to have a mix of international shows as well, it’s a different world, gives us a colour, different stories, different voice, different perspective. We’ll continue to co-produce shows with international partners as a balance with the stuff that we make here. It’s important for us not to limit our horizons and potential. We’re working on a puppet show at the moment which is a co-production with an American company and has a US showrunner on it but the majority of the writing staff are coming from England. We sent in some sample scripts and the showrunner thought the quality of the British scripts was absolutely fantastic and significantly higher than that of the US scripts. He found 10 writers that he’d happily work with
As well as the Something For The Kids seminar, BBC Writersroom and CBeebies are also running ‘Get A Squiggle On’ to encourage writers to come up with new shows for the 3-6 age range group. ‘We thought it would be a real creative challenge for writers to create new shows,’ says Jo Combes, New Writing Development Manager at BBC Writersoom. ‘What we’ve been asking for is new series ideas where writers have to send in a twenty minute script which has to be live action but could be set anywhere in an interesting location in the UK. You can involve puppets and music but the show has to be live action. So if you have a town or a city that you’d love to see at the centre of a programme, feel free to represent it in an authentic world.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunity/get_a_squiggle_on.shtml
Submission Deadline: Thursday 14th July, 6pm
