{"id":2823,"date":"2016-07-25T09:47:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T09:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/25\/why-the-beatles-are-on-kids-tv\/"},"modified":"2020-10-29T22:00:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-29T22:00:47","slug":"why-the-beatles-are-on-kids-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/25\/why-the-beatles-are-on-kids-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Beatles are on kids\u2019 TV"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Armstrong \/ The UK Times<\/em><\/p>\n

The relationship between children\u2019s TV and pop culture has always been simple: if you dabble in kid\u2019s TV and survive, you\u2019ll be a star. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gosling, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ben Affleck and, depending on your definition of survival, Britney Spears all broke through as child stars. What children\u2019s TV doesn\u2019t do is attract big stars once they\u2019ve made it. Until now.<\/p>\n

Coming up on Netflix this autumn is Trollhunters, a debut kids\u2019 show from the director of Pan\u2019s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, based on his own book and starring Kelsey Grammer. Also on Netflix: Watership Down, with James McAvoy, John Boyega, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Colman, Nicholas Hoult, Freddie Fox, Anne-Marie Duff and Gemma Arterton, and \u2014 first out of the traps, in August \u2014 Beat Bugs, an animated series in which James Corden, P!nk, Regina Spektor and the Shins perform slightly tweaked Beatles songs.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s drawing these big names to the streamed screen? There\u2019s the money, obviously. In January, the Netflix chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, announced that the streaming service would spend a big chunk of its $5bn (\u00a34bn) 2016 programme budget on children and family content. That\u2019s the kind of cash that works for Sony\/ATV, publishers of the Beatles\u2019 hits, as the Australian creator of Beat Bugs, Josh Wakely, discovered. \u201cI would say, \u2018I\u2019ve got this amazing idea for a kids\u2019 show, and all I have to do is get the Beatles rights.\u2019 I thought it would take four months. It took six years.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Sony\/ATV finally agreed to license the songs for a kids\u2019 TV series confirms how important this televisual backwater has become. \u201cFamilies are relatively underserved when it comes to \u2018watch together\u2019 programming,\u201d says Andy Yeatman, director of global kids\u2019 content at Netflix. \u201cThat\u2019s an opportunity we are poised to take on. Guillermo del Toro can create a 26-episode epic adventure saga that will launch on the same day in more than 190 countries. This opportunity did not exist until Netflix entered the space.\u201d<\/p>\n

For binge watchers of House of Cards, it may be a surprise that the company is spending heavily on fluorescent cartoons and glossy computer-animated series such as Dinotrux, about giant creatures that are half dinosaur, half construction vehicle. According to the media analyst Rich Greenfield, however, when Netflix launched a whole season of House of Cards at once, investors were terrified, fearing that users would sign up for the free days, watch the lot, then disconnect. Hip TV isn\u2019t that great a business.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy to cancel a streaming-service subscription \u2014 just one click,\u201d says Robin Parker, of Broadcast magazine. \u201cBut kids hate it when their favourite shows go away. When cable TV was launched, it was sports rights that won viewers. Later it was first-run drama. Now it\u2019s kids\u2019 TV. Children are the glue that makes subscriptions stick.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, while Netflix works up its 35 original new series this year, including many from its 2013 deal with DreamWorks for 300 hours of TV programmes, it\u2019s also sewing up a separate deal for Disney, with movies from its subsidiaries Marvel and Pixar, which will appear exclusively on the site from September. The movie deal so far covers only the US and Canada, but Netflix aims to make it global.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, HBO and Amazon are busy carving up the kids\u2019 output from the non-profit American channel PBS. In January, HBO started showing Sesame Street, while this month Amazon snapped up the rest of PBS\u2019s children\u2019s output and commissioned a slew of shows.<\/p>\n

A Canadian distributor, DHX Media, is going even further, buying up every kids\u2019 production company it can. Co-founded by Bowling for Columbine\u2019s producer, Michael Donovan, DHX owns almost 400 shows, including The Adventures of Paddington Bear, Inspector Gadget, Care Bears, The Herbs, Lassie, Sabrina and, since 2013, all of Ragdoll\u2019s output, notably Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. In other words, Donovan owns your nostalgia \u2014 and he\u2019s remaking it all over again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith kids\u2019 shows, things that work tend to always work,\u201d he explains over the phone from Toronto. \u201cThings that have worked in the past are more likely, by a significant metric, to work in the future. But many of these shows were created for entirely different TV specs \u2014 they\u2019re not HD-compatible and they\u2019re not great on YouTube. So we\u2019re remaking them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donovan\u2019s highest-profile revamp is Teletubbies, wrestled back to life last year and now filming its second season in a small studio in southwest London. Watching the shoot is surreal: there\u2019s no CGI, just actors in fur suits who stay in character the whole time. Being introduced to Laa-Laa involves gasping for breath as you\u2019re enfolded in Teletubby arms, the cry of \u201cBig hug!\u201d echoing in your ears.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a huge investment. Over here, though, we\u2019re in danger of selling off old classics and failing to develop new ones. According to figures from Ofcom, terrestrial British broadcasters spent \u00a377m on first-run, UK-originated children\u2019s programming in 2015, down 13% year on year and 45% over the decade. About 90% of that total comes from the BBC.<\/p>\n

\u201cNetflix is great at branding,\u201d says Alice Webb, director of BBC children\u2019s TV. \u201cWe\u2019ve co-produced Watership Down with them, but they\u2019re good at insisting that, however involved they are, they get to call the show a Netflix Original. That\u2019s the way kids\u2019 viewing is going, following programmes and brands, rather than channels. We\u2019re trying to ensure public- service stories get told as well, and with live-action shows, not just animation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To spread these stories across the digital space, Webb pioneered the BBC iPlayer Kids app, launched in April. Already, 33% of viewing of the kids\u2019 channels CBBC and CBeebies is via the iPlayer, compared with 2% for BBC1. And Sky has just revamped its children\u2019s app, allowing downloads and an animated bedtime button.<\/p>\n

You hope both will succeed, so our kids can continue to enjoy an anthropomorphic blob of clay or a slightly earnest school-based drama. Algorithms might make for the finest shows money can buy, but children\u2019s TV needs shambolic, downright silly ideas, put together by eccentrics with worthy intentions; and, in that narrow field, we are best in class.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Armstrong \/ The UK Times The relationship between children\u2019s TV and pop culture has always been simple: if you dabble in kid\u2019s TV and survive, you\u2019ll be a star. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gosling, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ben Affleck and, depending on your definition of survival, Britney Spears all broke through as child … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy the Beatles are on kids\u2019 TV - Thunderbird Entertainment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/25\/why-the-beatles-are-on-kids-tv\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why the Beatles are on kids\u2019 TV - Thunderbird Entertainment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Stephen Armstrong \/ The UK Times The relationship between children\u2019s TV and pop culture has always been simple: if you dabble in kid\u2019s TV and survive, you\u2019ll be a star. 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