Writing for Children
I've been reading the scripts to the Magic Roundabout recently. It is clear that they represent a considerable store of genius. It led me to consider one of the difficulties of writing for television. This is the knowledge that even if you write a superlative series or programme, if you have created something completely original and delightful, the general public will probably never get a chance to see it. Even Mr. Ben, which was such a fabulous success that its thirteen episodes have been shown every year ever since they were made, can only appear once on television in any given day. In all likelihood not everyone who wants to see them, or who might like to see them, but doesn't know about them, will catch them when they come on. Most will be at work, many more will be watching other channels, or out playing in the garden with twigs and closely examining how bumblebees hold on to flowers as they land.
And while I don't advocate distracting your children from such wholesome pursuits, it must surely hurt if you are Mr. Ben's creator to know that your work is at the mercy of such vagaries. Unlike say, E. Nesbit, whose work any interested party can pick up at any stage of the day that suits them, and resume again whenever they get a chance.
As a TV writer, and I think that by now it should be clear that I am particularly thinking about a children's writer, you can have your work shown once and then it is never seen again. If it went out at the wrong time, or wasn't commissioned for a second series, then it will be as if it never existed. Authors of books can hope that word of mouth might build their readers, if they believe in the quality of their work. But a television programme which isn't noticed when it goes out evaporates into the ether.
There is a trade off of course. Although some children's books stay with you for life, most are just eyeball fodder. However, if you make a really original children's programme you can invite an enormous number of impressionable minds to join you in a universe of your own creation for a while. I know that that a lot of my personality was shaped by the gentle anarchy of programmes like Chorlton and the Wheelies, Bagpuss or the Magic Door sections of Bosco. (Who could resist a door that actually takes you to the factory where they make HB Brunches?)
The humour, the occasionally melancholy tone, and the certainty that the adult world was filled with mysteries stayed with me. When I sat down to devise a television series as part of my postgrad, it was the most natural thing in the world to start to write for children. Both because it was what I kept coming back to when I tried to think what televison had meant the most to me, and because it gives the writer the freedom to do anything.
If your children's story conform to a formula or is quite like somthing you've seen before, the chances are that it will just join the great cloud of forgotten images. But if you are willing to really sink into your own childhood, as E. Nesbit said she would do to write her books, then you will find you can connect with the deeply strange, illogical and engergetic imagination of a child.
10:58:13 PM 
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