Totting up a winner

CBeebies characters like Superbaby are much-loved by very young viewers but how, asks Janine Gibson, does the BBC measure its impact on toddlers?

If the number one social crime is smoking and the second eating too much cake, the third must, by a country mile, be allowing the under-fives to watch television. Not a week goes by without a new piece of research revealing the debilitating effects of parking tots in front of a screen for hours on end; a form of abuse which leads inevitably first to attention deficit disorder and then couch potato syndrome. The report linking smoking to children's television can only be moments away.

So imagine my delight when just last week my own contribution to the soaring statistics of delinquent toddlers began to show disturbing signs of becoming obsessed with television. A character on the eminently suitable CBeebies show Storymakers (it's set in a library! They make books! No one smokes!) called Superbaby was the culprit, and a chance mention of this in the office revealed another, similarly obsessed two-year-old. Further investigation uncovered more addicts. A small baby doll in a cape, superimposed on a primary-coloured cartoon background, flying around looking for sad people to help has transfixed the target two-year-old age group and that's not as easy as it might sound.

Superbaby ("she's super, she's dooper, she really is a trooper, Superbaby!"), makes only fleeting appearances among the large cast of characters that appear in Storymakers, but she's the only one to be aimed squarely at the bottom end of the two- to five-year-old target audience. Producer Tony Reed, aware of the huge span of ability, interest and awareness in that range, felt the show was skewing too old as it entered its fourth series and wanted to balance it with a story aimed at the younger ones. He began with picture books for two-year-olds and the knowledge that television for little ones means saying what you see and illustrating it, ideally with specially commissioned music to hold the story together. The idea of a superhero who's also a baby, doing good in exchange for a hug, pleased the team who felt it was witty enough to amuse the older audience and could also work for the tots.

As with all great childhood cult series, there's a shortage of supply. Only 15 four-minute episodes of Superbaby exist - it's relatively expensive for CBeebies, with its animation and special music, but it's judged to have worked well for the very, very young, insofar as the channel can tell. Clare Elstow, who heads the BBC's pre-school unit, points out that Barb doesn't have boxes or viewing diaries for the under-fives, so CBeebies is one of the last bastions of television not governed by the demon ratings. Perhaps that's why instinct, experience, quality and charm still feature largely in the production decisions.

Instead of numbers, the commissioners and producers rely on a network of nurseries, pre-schools and carers around the country to research their ideas. They have plenty of advisers, literacy guidelines, curriculum basics and early learning goals, but essentially this very expe rienced group of people learned how to make television for toddlers by spending their working lives trying to see through their eyes.

Since the launch of CBeebies, the BBC has produced the toddler juggernauts Balamory, the Shiny Show and Tikkabilla from scratch. Along with the big out-of-house commissions, Teletubbies, Tweenies and Fimbles, these shows have enough core learning principles to gladden the heart of any reviewer from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). More importantly the shows are adored by their audience for some basic reasons.

Toddler TV means long close-ups on human presenters' faces with plenty of eye contact and lip synching. Tikkabilla (it means Hopscotch in Hindi), a song and dance-heavy magazine show not dissimilar to Play School, was described by one nursery school carer as the "the best one-to-one contact some children get all day". Repetition is key for the preschooler but perhaps the most important thing is the principle that every time producers introduce a character, an animal, a shape, a number or a colour, it may be the first time a child has seen it. Never assume is the golden rule of preschool telly.

There is something scary about endeavouring to create telly addicts out of two-year-olds. Elstow admits that CBeebies, and its fellow pre-school channels such as Nick Jr, rely on parents and carers not only to show judgment over how much television they allow children to watch, but to watch it with them so they get the most out of it. However, she is scathing about the quality of the vast majority of research. "It is almost entirely based on children exposed to a whole range of TV, most of it not age-appropriate, so it's hardly surprising if they don't get much out of it.

"Research that looks specifically at quality pre-school programming has often found a pretty positive correlation with later achievement". And whether it be in answer to the DCMS review or not, the newest CBeebies shows all have a clear public service remit. Razzle Dazzle is aimed at developing listening and communication skills among children whose carers spend less and less time talking to them one-to-one. Boogie Beebies is about getting children to dance around - aimed at the couch potatoes - and Something Special, a project which started in BBC Education, uses Makaton sign language developed for children with learning difficulties. It's an enormous relief for us repeat social offenders to discover that the BBC intends to look after our toddlers so carefully. As Elstow points out: CBeebies is the one place left in the BBC which is still pleased to be called Auntie.