Kids’ TV: The Surprising Story review – the fascinating tale of how CBBC has opened our minds

Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead? This was the title of a long-running kids’ show that, through ironic inversion, showed the BBC’s self-loathing at producing content for what The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob would later call the omnidirectional sludge pump.

Don’t tell me what to do, I told TV in 1970s. If I wanted to waste my life having my prepubescent sexuality shaped by ogling presenters such as Magpie’s Susan Stranks, Play School’s Floella Benjamin, Tiswas’s Sally James and the nameless Swedish protagonist of proto-Scandi noir Gold on Crow Mountain, that was my business. If my brother and I would solemnise our fondness for Bill and Ben by making tinfoil hats from custard tarts the better to imitate the Flower Pot Men’s preverbal “Flobba dob”, nobody could stop us.

Why Don’t You? was, as Konnie Huq points out in her alternative history, Kids’ TV: The Surprising Story (BBC One), based on the same principles of user-generated content as YouTube and TikTok. It was cheap and cheerless, usually consisting of my swivel-eyed coevals suggesting that you could spend the summer holidays crafting rubbish rather than, as I did, lying in my jim-jams necking custard creams and being importuned by regionally challenged tryhards. Huq includes a clip of a girl in Belfast making the letter H out of cardboard, gluing coins to its surface and then hanging the resulting bling around her neck. She looks like the least badass rapper in the history of even Northern Irish hip-hop. And then – this is the best bit – she invited viewers to do the same if they want to look trendy. Why don’t you do one, I might well have told the telly.

Huq, one-time Blue Peter presenter and so part of the problem of making generations of British kids good for literally nothing, fascinatingly proposes that kids’ TV was not mind-rotting but good for us. Johnny Ball was effectively a numeracy ambassador. As Huq grew up, what she watched was a diverse alternative to a racist, homophobic and otherwise narrow-minded British society. But of course Huq would say that, wouldn’t she?

She relates something sad about the Huq family. Her parents would summon her to watch the racist 70s sitcom Mind Your Language because at least there was a south Asian couple on it – even though they and all the other diverse members attending the evening class in the sitcom were devised to be laughed at for their funny voices. Racist representation was, at least, representation.

Kids’ TV was different. It was an outlier for a different kind of diversity. Trinidad-born Dame Floella became a role model to Huq. She had scarcely seen a Black Briton on telly other than in racist contexts. Me neither. Perhaps, then, kids’ TV made Britain less racist than it would otherwise be.

Huq sensibly rounds on parents who blubbed that the Teletubbies were dumbing down their spawn. Tim Smith, professor of cognitive psychology at Birkbeck, tells Huq that the preverbal sounds of Laa-Laa et al were devised precisely to speed little viewers along the path to language acquisition.

Huq sidesteps the Tinky Winky Controversy, spurred by the televangelist Jerry Falwell, who charged that Tinky Winky’s handbag normalised sodomy or some such homophobic guff. Grownups were always telling kids that their telly was corrupting, never realising that what adults saw in Tinky Winky’s handbag and other supposed evils were projections of their own manifold psychological and ethical shortcomings.

As for diversity, Huq reminded us that in 1988, what grownups hilariously called “homosexual acts” between two men aged below 21 were illegal, and Margaret Thatcher’s Local Government Act forbade schools teaching the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. In such a climate, Leslie Stewart and Roger Tonge’s teen drama Two of Us had to cut the kiss between the two teen boys. Only in 1990 could the kiss be restored. Tonge tells Huq that he still keeps the letters from kids struggling with their sexuality who found his drama consoling,

Kids’ TV remains an outlier for a kinder, more inclusive world, Huq tells us, citing CBeebies’ George Webster, the channel’s first presenter with Down’s syndrome.

True, there are many lacunae in Huq’s analysis. Where’s Rastamouse? Where’s Bayleaf the Gardener? Where’s the analysis of the military-industrial complex of Camberwick Green’s Pippin Fort? When Grange Hill, after dramatising heroin addict Zammo in rehab, released the hit single Just Say No, did it change teen attitudes to drug taking?

But there is a bigger question. Why don’t you turn off the television set? Today’s kids already have. Huq should make another programme asking how today’s little herberts, without the omnidirectional sludge pump for guidance, get the positive images and diverse messages that she champions.