Children’s Radio

In Britain, children’s radio, here defined as programming specifically aimed at child audiences, is synonymous with the public-service British Broadcasting Company (BBC), emerging on December 5, 1922, during the transition of wireless technologies from military monopoly to mass social use. With childhood constituted through hegemonic middle-class discourses of innocent and vulnerable malleability, A. E. Thomson, an engineer employed by the BBC (a private cartel that preceded the 1927 inauguration of the public service BBC), presented a few minutes of entertainment ‘just for children’. Eighteen days later, dedicated programming for children was consolidated as a central plank of British broadcast culture when The Children’s Hour commenced a run that continued until March 27, 1964, laying down a blueprint for subsequent children’s broadcast entertainment that extends to ...