“Well, we all need a little love in our lives.” So replied the actor-musician François Clemmons, who for 25 years played Officer Clemmons on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (Family Communications, 1968-2001), when he was asked recently why he thought it was that the new documentary about his friend Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor (Tremolo, […]

I started my career studying and writing about television and children by watching my own children watch television and becoming very intrigued about the views of the world they were being shown in the preschool programmes they saw. I wasn’t alarmed or disapproving – just intrigued, also very entertained.

CFP: Global Studies of Childhood Special Issue: Children and Popular Culture Guest Editor: Patrick Cox, Rutgers University Childhood and youth are always contested notions, but perhaps nowhere more than in popular culture.

The BFI Media Conference is a unique event for teachers of film and media at 16+ and in HE, bringing together an exciting mix of new and creative ideas from the worlds of the media industries, teaching and research.

I blogged last year for CSTonline about how shared conceptions of childhood facilitated links between television institutions and audiences across Europe, in case of the children’s documentary series If You Were Me (BBC 1971-75). This blog follows up with some examples of how networks of borrowing and collaboration around Europe underpinned children’s animation programmes from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Canon: A collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine: ‘the biblical canon’; The works of a particular author or artist that are recognized as genuine: ‘the Shakespeare canon’ (Oxford Dictionaries. Online) Apologies, but I’ve marked an awful lot of student essays recently (and I do mean awful). This stylish trend for opening one’s work with an easily Googled dictionary definition is infectious. In the worst possible sense. See?

There’s a general rule of thumb about the BBC Archives recognised by fans of old television – that we can confidently expect programmes from after late 1977 to survive. Thanks to the good work of Sue Malden in establishing BBC Archive guidelines, it was only at this time – rather late in the day in terms of recording technology – that a policy of systematically preserving BBC TV programming came into being.

The British pre-school children’s television programme Teletubbies was made by Ragdoll Productions for BBC and first screened from 1997-2001. To my delight it was announced at the end of September that the series will return later this year, now produced by DHX Media.