U.K Children’s T.V Programmes Decline.

For quite a while now children’s T.V programmes has regularly been mentioned within the media’s news due to the increasing cuts of British children’s programmes and OFCOM have tried to come up with ways of trying to prevent this.

When I was younger there was plenty of children’s T.V programmes on terrestrial T.V channels in the mornings before school, and after school between 3 and 5pm. The majority of children’s programmes shown on BBC 1 (CBBC) and ITV (CITV) were aimed towards British children and were often British made programmes such as ‘Basil Brush’ and ‘The Worse Witch’



These days with the increasingly growing number of multi-channels it has helped to cut the amount of British T.V programmes shown because more International programmes are being imported such as ‘Hannah Montana’ shown on the popular ‘Disney channel’ and ‘Drake and Josh’ shown on ‘Nickelodeon’.






According to Owen Gibson a Media Correspondent of The Guardian (2007) the amount of hours of children’s programmes broadcast on ITV have fallen by 60% and on channel 5 by 58%.

Now that ITV have cut all costs to make more British children’s programmes and no longer have the CITV hours shown after school, it’s down to the BBC independent producers to keep making British T.V programmes but with the recent job cuts at the BBC cutting almost half of their staff contracts it’s highly likely that it’s going to be more repeats and even more imports. There is also an on going discussion to move children’s programmes from BBC1 to BBC2.

According to an article published on the Timesonline

‘OFCOM said that programmes aimed at British children would continue to decline because more producers wanted shows that would sell internationally’

The article also stated that

‘OFCOM found that despite the number of children’s dedicated channels rising to 25, the spending on British programming fell from £127 million in 1998 to £109 million in 2006.’


Although many children’s programmes are being imported, the British children’s programmes such as ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and ‘The Story of Tracy Beaker’ shown on the CBBC channel on digital T.V are proving to be more popular than programmes shown on other children’s channels according to the BARB data.





So is it right that more and more cuts should be made in producing British children’s programmes?

‘OFCOM suggested that a specific fund for children’s programmes could be created, possibly from a levy on commercial broadcasters. A new children’s “public service broadcaster” could be set up making programmes for the internet, mobile phones and Television.’

But one things for sure British Programmes are going to continue to decline whether we like or not.
Although this appears to be an economic thing, I believe that British children’s programmes should continued to be made so that British culture is represented and British children can relate to programmes as well as be entertained.