Watching Cbeebies with my 10-month old son this morning made me realise something. Namely, that there is something fundamental about children's TV, and more specifically, the ideology behind it.
I am not talking about an educational style, cognitive benefits or anything like that, but how much we as a nation and society understand the importance of public services and how ingrained we are that society functions in such a beneficial way. Or, to put it simply, Pierre Bourdieu in his influential Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, stated that aesthetic judgements cannot be divorced from social relations.
It occured to me for example, just how many programmes, old and new, encourage the audience to learn about buses. Not cars, aeroplanes or taxis. The first mode of transport represented to children is a public service. Of course, other modes soon follow, but I don't recall that kids' classic song The Wheels on the Family Saloon going round and round.
Other examples in one morning's viewing include the importance of libraries, public parks and the social benefits of an allotment - those council subsidised spaces that almost seem to belong to a bygone age.
It almost seems like a Reithian concept; a leftish BBC trying to "educate, entertain and inform" the masses, but not necessarily what they want to know. It is interesting that this is so. Children it seems, are exposed to the value of public services and the workings of a society operated by the masses from an early age. Surely a good thing, and one that arguably need to continue whilst they still exist, particularly under the draconian measures taken by the Con-Dem coalition.
But this is not a particularly recent development, rather a continuation of ideology stretching back decades. Of course, years ago it was no surprise that children should learn about buses or factories. After all this was the order of the day. For the majority of the working-class, taking a bus to work, riding a bicycle in the country, or walking to church were activities that were sung about, talked about, or for the purpose of this blog, watched with mother.
A Really Useful Trade Union.
In children's literature too, even the bourgeoisie knew the importance of public services, regulation and jobs associated with the mass of working-class. The Rev. W Awdry, the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine series, (the Church of England in the 1950s itself arguably a symbol of middle-class intelligentsia) included Bertie into his canon; a bus.However, this bus is arguably a negative perception of the working-class. The genteel, steam-age locomotives of the middle-class (even their names are middle-class in comparison with 'Bertie') are challenged by the more common bus and all that he negatively represents; the masses, vulgarity, and the development of roads. Even his colour is red!
Many critics have applied social class to aspects of children's media, usually approaching it from a cultural aspect. All I am attempting to do is highlight the fact that the social usefulness of various institutions are still presented to our children, which can only be a good thing. One such critic, Ellen Seiter in Sold Seperately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture, suggests that in Marxist cultural critique, any attack on the seemingly one-dimensional 'shallowness' of contemporary children's programming automatically yet paradoxically takes the position of the 'old' bourgeoisie in its attack.
But I digress. In the end, despite David Cameron's disgusting and destructive plans for his fabled and unworkable Big Society, the working-class are still teaching its offspring the value and importance of a workable society, and is doing so through its media; its publicly owned media. And if those children grow up with a knowledge of factories, schools, buses, hospitals and the Post Office and the importance of the strength of the workers in those institutions, the more privatisation and deregulation might, just might, be staved off.
