Television Programming, Children's

Over the past 20 to 30 years, music has become a more integral part of children's television programs. Producers have shifted from providing slow, clear messages that could easily be understood—often articulated through inventive deployments of song and underscoring—to the creation of entertainments enhanced with nearly continuous music and a plethora of sound effects. This entry considers how music serves to support or distract children in their television audio-viewing and reviews the small body of evidence that has addressed this conclusively before outlining future directions for research.

Television scholar David Buckingham identifies three main strands of children's television programming: educational (e.g., Sesame Street), storytelling (e.g., Jackanory), and entertainment or surreal storytelling (e.g., Octonauts). Music features more prominently in all three strands than in adult television, and research shows that children obtain a great proportion of their daily music exposure through television. This dominance of music in children's television is partly the legacy of Hollywood cartoon scoring, although canonical educational shows such as Sesame Street, in which at least 71 percent of the action is accompanied by music, have also influenced scoring practices.

Research into children's television scoring over a 30-year period, however, suggests a gradually increasing saturation of music cues across all strands, partly in response to the changing aesthetics of television production during this period. Scoring practices on television often blend original underscoring with reiterated blocks of score and the use of library music. Reiterated blocks were once the norm in children's television—cheap to produce, such repetitions also appealed to children's supposed learning styles. Nowadays, many prestigious shows (especially those with sizeable merchandizing) feature scoring original to each episode, which accompanies almost all of the action.

The increasing volume (in terms of both the amount and auditory level of the music) and busyness of contemporary children's programming—which mimics wider recent trends through its reliance on what has been termed intensified continuity editing (fast cutting, whip pans, lens glare, etc.)—produces strong orientation effects every few seconds. This serves to lock attention to the product on-screen, cutting off the distractions of the myriad of channels on the remote control, not to mention the alternative entertainments [Page 1110]of the iPod, gaming console, laptop, tablet, or mobile device (or more traditional toys).

Looking at just one British television program, Postman Pat, over the span of its history from 1981 to the present day provides a clear illustration of the changing roles of music in children's television. Postman Pat, originally created for British Broadcasting Network (BBC) 1 but now syndicated worldwide, is an animated program designed for children age 3 to 5. Its opening title sequence offers a useful barometer of the show's changing musical aesthetics and functions. In the first incarnation of the program, composer Brian Daly's theme was sung by a gentle male voice accompanied by flutes, strings, acoustic guitar, and shuffling percussion: The effect was both playful and pastoral. The visual information matched the semiotic content of the music and also its subtle audio-viewer arousal. During the 90-second sequence's 11 sedate shots, Pat and his van idled across a series of bucolic landscapes, often shot from a static camera. Within each episode's action, the mildly dramatic stories were then matched by the style of the storytelling: A single voice calmly narrated, cutting was sedate and the camera either slow or immobile, and there was relatively little music or sound effects—although cues were used at scene changes, and occasionally, the narrator sang a song relating to the story.

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