Friends and Allies
The Save Kids’ TV sponsored meeting to co-ordinate the plans of eleven organisations engaged in the campaign produced a unique press statement revealing the extent of the alliance – from audience groups to craft guilds – and a unanimity of purpose. The alliance will meet at regular intervals to keep in touch. This is the statement which all parties will add to their own press-releases when reacting to the Ofcom review.
Joint statement on public service children’s broadcasting
- UK-made children’s programming is an important part of public service broadcasting, reflecting the lives of children living in Britain today and telling their stories in a way that imported programmes cannot. The members of some of the bodies represented in this statement play a crucial role in the creation of that programming and all of the above organisations care passionately about the young audience they serve.
- The Ofcom report on public service broadcasting to children has revealed the full extent of the crisis in funding for children’s television, which threatens not just the survival of a once thriving sector of the media industry, but the range and quality of public service programming available to UK children.
- This has serious implications for the cultural entitlement of young people in the UK and, over time, for the cohesion of our society.
- The BBC’s service for children is excellent but it cannot do everything. A BBC monopoly, even in certain areas of children’s programming, is dangerous for programme makers, for the diversity of programmes on offer to the audience, and in the long run for the BBC itself.
- The funding crisis can no longer be ignored. The industry is already in decline and children are already experiencing less choice in the programmes they would like to watch. If we wait to address this problem, we will be failing our children and risking fundamental damage to an industry which has up to now provided them with their own stories, their own voices and their own perspective on the world in which they live.
- We urge Ofcom and Parliament to ensure an appropriate range of UK-produced public service programmes for children through intervention.
The organisations which signed up to this statement were:
Action for Children’s Arts
ALCS (The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society)
BECTU (The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union)
DPRS (The Directors and Producers’ Rights Society)
Equity
The International Broadcasting Trust
PACT (The Independent Producers’ Alliance)
Save Kids TV
The Society of Authors
The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain
The Voice of the Listener and Viewer
