If so much Children’s TV is written by adults, how does that colour what the industry thinks is appropriate for them, and in what ways might it potentially get things wrong?
That was a question posed recently to a panel at the Australian Content in the Streaming Era Symposium.
Writer / director Nick Verso (Crazy Fun Park), treading carefully in his response, acknowledged there were inherent risks of adults making content for children.
“There has been a bit of a shift in terms of who is creating the content, I would say, for kids. I grew up with 80s and 90s content and a lot of that stuff for kids was Steven Spielberg. It’s Joel Schumacher. It’s Round the Twist, Esben Storm, Paul Jennings, Jonathan Schiff,” he said.
He continued, “It was actually about appealing to their own inner child. They were kind of doing ‘This is what I think would be fun. This is what I wanted to do as a kid, but couldn’t.’ So you were playing around with that sort of content. That was Tony Ayres’ approach with Nowhere Boys. It was certainly my approach with Crazy Fun Park. It was very much ‘Let’s be cheeky and mischievous and playful…let’s get the kids into trouble.’
“But that’s a very tricky thing for the ABC when you’ve got immitable behavior and people ready to accuse you of anything if someone were to copy something.”
Noting that the industry has historically been pretty sexist and shut out a lot of female creators and diverse writers, Kids TV has served as an entry point for female creatives.
“I actually think what we’re seeing now in a lot of kids TV is a lot of content created by mothers, and that’s just a slightly different approach to storytelling,” said Verso (pictured above, centre)
“I’ve often received notes on things from mothers who will approach something quite different to an overgrown kid like me. They’ll say things like, ‘I wouldn’t want my son hanging out with these characters.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but your son wants to and he’s probably doing it.’ So either you tell the truth of that, or you’ll just be out of touch with it. That’s kind of the choices I see it to be brutally honest.
“So I think there is a difference in the approach. I’ve because I’ve worked with a lot of mothers who have been creating shows as ‘love letters’, in a way to their kids, and they do have a certain degree of responsibility and care that I certainly do not have when I’m approaching story! Because it is about trying to keep their kids safe and protect them a bit, whereas I’m trying to get them into trouble.
“So I think that’s a little bit of a difference in how kids TV, particularly, is being formulated at the moment.”
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