PRESENT TENSE:USUALLY, WHEN a branch of the arts is a multi-billion-euro industry, ubiquitous in our culture and hugely influential over a large swathe of the population, you could expect coverage of it in your newspapers on a weekly basis.
Or perhaps regular reviews, interviews and chin-scratching dissections on The View. And yet there is a money-spinning, attitude-altering, generation-defining art form that does not get any of these things: children's television.
Seriously, children's television is art? Grown-ups in Day-Glo boiler suits singing songs about sharing? Prancing dinosaurs? Precocious children with gun-to-their-head smiles? Sexually ambiguous plasticine men? All of this is art? Yes. Well, some of it.
If you accept that animation is art, that television drama and comedy are art - and that stretching the imagination is a function of art - then you have to accept that children's television makes its fair share of art too. Like all art, much of it is bad and some it is good. Unlike most art, in fact, a high proportion of it is pretty good. This is partly because it is a ruthlessly competitive world. Its makers are predatory, but its audience is highly discerning. You might think that a three-year-old would be easily pleased - but only if you don't know any three-year-olds. Ultimately, this is an industry with a cultural power and influence which far outweighs that of theatre, contemporary classical music or modern art.
I can only talk about preschool TV (my current field of expertise, although that will change) but children's television programmes are a strange mix of commercial behemoth and infotainment. Yes, it's commercially driven, but much of it is expertly disguised as educational fun. This is partly due to the demands of broadcasting legislation. In the US, for instance, a condition of a broadcasting licence is that a proportion of the programming has to meet the "educational and informational needs" of children. There are similar guidelines across other territories. For instance, RTÉ's charter demands that it recognises the special needs of children as part of the audience.
The problem for terrestrial broadcasters is that there isn't a huge amount of revenue to be made by their broadcasting children's TV, and in recent years ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 in the UK have all slashed or withdrawn their investment in the area. The BBC has also made cuts. In Ireland, TV3 and Channel 6 show little children's programming. TG4, however, has an admirable record in dubbing foreign shows into Irish. The Muppetsas Gaeilge is a particularly successful cultural mash-up.
However, programme-makers and distributors can make massive profits. Hit Entertainment, which was sold for more than half a billion euro in 2005, is the Chelsea of the business, owning the likes of Bob the Builder, Angelina Ballerina, Thomas the Tank Engine, Barney, Fireman Samand Pingu. The trick in children's television is to make programmes with global appeal, which is why American television is so strong, although British programmes contribute to Hit's increasingly mammoth revenues from DVD sales and general merchandising. Bob the Builderalone is believed to have earned over €1 billion so far.
A Bob the Builderstage show will come to Dublin this month, as will The Wiggles. The latter are four middle-aged musical Australians in colour-coded Star Trek uniforms, who have sold almost 22.5 million DVDs and seven million CDs, and who sold out Madison Square Garden over 12 successive days. Originally an adult-orientated rock band called The Cockroaches, by 2006 their kiddie-orientated songs had made them Australia's highest-earning entertainers, ahead of Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. There are a lot less lucrative things for a frustrated rock'n'roller to do than to end up rich on the back of songs such as Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car.
When yellow Wiggleleft the band, they used his illness in an episode, seeing it as a "teachable" moment. They didn't go into the medical details of his condition, orthostatic intolerance, but the message was simple, responsible and delivered in a colourful way. And that's the thing about kids' TV. It is a relentless money-spinner and grabber but at the heart of much of it there is rather sweet, usually educational, and sometimes very imaginative television.
Some examples: Lazytown is a globally successful Icelandic show featuring an acrobatic superhero in a world of puppets, but, ironically, is renowned for its get-off-the-couch message as well its innovative special effects. Dora the Exploreris responsible for a great many preschoolers having much better Spanish than their parents.
Wonder Petsfeatures three small animals who dash around the world to rescue animals - and it also happens to be the most popular new opera in about a century.
Television's influence on children is more often than not seen in a negative light. However, while behind the sweetness lurks a marketing monster determined to ravage every parent's wallet, let's not pretend that it is the only exploitative art form.
Much television is cynical or commercially minded; the publishing world is extremely exploitative; the film industry is famously so. It is the entertainment world's job to be exploitative, but it doesn't mean it doesn't churn out some good stuff.
