CBBC: The Downfall

It started back in 2019.

From the moment I left school, I had to trust CBBC. I had no choice. I needed to watch both Scream Street and Strange Hill High to protect me from the world, to be my guide, to help me navigate the difficult, confusing and vulnerable journey to exiting the most overwhelming period of an autistic teen’s life.

Unfortunately, ever since they used Almost Never as a box set experiment for iPlayer, and ever since the pandemic hit, they had done none of those things!

I loved Scream Street and still will do, but through commissioning a second, serialised series in honor of Tommy Donbavand’s storyline-driven original books, CBBC took a viewer’s trust and smashed it into bits in what was actually a 13-year-long mission to destroy some landmark, homegrown creativity that they might’ve destroyed a long time ago when they launched if it weren’t for Tracy Beaker.

Looking back, I actually prefer the old days of CBBC, before it relied on geezer/grown up gross out humor. Everything was not only localised but each also represented each child in the British population and their different stories, as told through Tracy Beaker and her struggles growing up in care, or Jack and Emily and their many fantasies in Microsoap.

Honestly, this era of CBBC was much, much better, because even though some shows had flashy transitions and montages, some of them were actually quite fun to watch. Take Frankenstein’s Cat for instance - Joe Pasquale did a terrific job voicing Nine, despite the animation style looking remarkably similar to Johnny Test, which switched animation studios during production on Series 3.

Speaking of cartoons, CBBC has not done such a good job with them lately. All of them are dizzying and overwhelming to watch, because not all of them are done with handmade techniques - well, okay, some are. Examples include Pokemon, which I find unfitting for the channel’s truly British aesthetic due to its popularity among fans of CITV and Cartoon Network.

It isn’t just CBBC that needs a severe talking to, either - ever since Moon & Me premiered, CBeebies has been shown to go drastically downhill. All its life on air up until Moon & Me’s cryptic premiere promos, all its programmes were entirely handmade and truly rooted in British culture, from classics like Teletubbies and Bob The Builder to modern masterpieces like Clangers and Hey Duggee.

Unfortunately, it feels like they’ve failed in their mission to do so. For example, ever since Moon & Me premiered in February 2019, CBeebies traumatised not just their young target audience, but their parents too, by ripping Abney & Teal from their place on the Bedtime strand and airing a trio of noisy, unrestful cartoons before Clangers even starts on the weekends: Tee & Mo, Charlie & Lola and Sarah & Duck.

Charlie & Lola especially. The cartoon just consists of fast visuals and only the high pitched, annoying voices of kids voicing the characters, which makes it highly inappropriate for bedtime viewing. Another flaw is how they constantly aired the Tee & Mo Bedtime Song before the Bedtime Story every single night.

Parents might be getting fed up of all this, and it got worse after Bluey premiered. After this hyperactively wild Aussie dog premiered, more imported shows started to appear on CBeebies, which just adds to many parents’ frustration. Three examples include:

Lu & The Bally Bunch

Spidey & His Amazing Friends

The Weasy Family

It all comes down to the costs, as everyone keeps saying these days. The good folks at the BBC are now visually rotten corporate tycoons who think handmade content and localised productions are strictly against the rules and only believe that America should dominate the British hierarchy, as demonstrated through CBBC’s newly imported cartoons.

And where do we end up now? With Trump trying to bring the Iran war to our country? No, and I think there might not be a single British programme in sight. And by that, I meant - nothing! Nothing which is ever rooted in our British history.

If you look at shows like Trumpton and Chigley, they had that slow-paced, calm, low stimulating charm that all kids’ shows refuse to inherit these days. With the rise of streaming, kids’ channels only air one show to draw viewers back in.

They think attention is all that matters, but we don’t want it yelling at our kids like they’ve been recruited into the army for the rest of our lives. We want storytelling, and plenty of it. British television was ultimately designed to get kids reading, writing and learning, just by seeing their favourite classics come to life.

If this happened today, the same problem we’re facing now won’t happen either.

But sadly, it had to happen. The problem we have to solve is:

How do we ask the BBC and ITV to make more localised programming? Kids will not know where they are or who we are.

And where they are is the most important identity for them to recognise.