his work and in other writers. Perhaps the writer whose textual approach is most
affected by television and film is again an Australian, Paul Jennings, who with a series of
books (for example, Unreal! Eight Surprising Stories (1985), Unbelievable! More Surprising
Stories (1987)) has perfected a snappy style that seems to owe a lot to the swift cross-
cutting of visual images in television and film, and as a consequence, has become
something of a cult figure among young teenagers.
The problems of the relation of reading to other media has a history virtually as long
as there have been films to see, radio programmes to listen to and television to watch—
and, as it happens, children have been included in each of these media almost right from
their respective beginnings. In America, L.Frank Baum was making silent films of his
book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) in the early 1900s. In Britain, radio
programmes aimed at children were broadcast virtually from the inception of public
broadcasting (from 1922 until 1964 and fitfully since). On television, in both America and
Britain, children’s programmes appeared at the start of full nationwide service. In fact, it
was a Mickey Mouse cartoon that was stopped in midstream when the British television
service closed down for the war in September 1939—and the same cartoon re-opened
the service in June 1946 (Home 1993:17).
Anxiety on the part of people keen to support reading has been expressed for many
years. In The World Radio and Television Annual. Jubilee Issue (1946), there is an article
called ‘Children and Radio’ by Ruth Adam. She situates herself in what was already a
long history of anxiety: ‘Magistrates used to grieve constantly over the influence of films.
I’ve heard teachers blame the inaccuracy and lazy thinking of an entire school on the
cinema habit’ (79). Then, in what is a defence of radio—a medium that ‘is accessible from
before the time the household is stirring until bedtime’ (79)—Adam concedes that ‘the
radio habit makes for careless listening. In homes where the radio is a continual
background noise, children cultivate protective deafness’ (80). But she goes on to point
out how radio widens horizons and ‘lifts lessons like Literature, History and Geography
onto a plane which most of us—if we were fortunate—may have experienced just once in
our school career’ (80). She finishes by putting in a plea for learning how to listen and
hoping that children will not do their homework with the radio on.
Here, in incipient form, are many of the battles that have been fought throughout
most of the twentieth century around issues of children’s literature and the other media.
There is now a whole canon of anti-television-for-children critiques (see Goldsen 1977;
Postman 1983; Winn 1985) from either left- or right-wing perspectives, the origins of
which have been traced back to Plato who proposed to ban the dramatic poets from his
ideal Republic, for fear that their stories about the immoral antics of the gods would
influence impressionable young minds (Buckingham 1993:7). Radio has now become the
good fairy in the debate and is praised for its appeal to the imagination, unlike the visual
media which, it is often claimed ‘leave nothing to the imagination’, prevent children from
thinking, turn them into passive couch potatoes, render them subject to consumerism,
turn them into atomised, separate non-collective, non-communitarian individuals.
Clearly, it is hard to disentangle a series of quite different concerns here:
moral, aesthetic, educational, cognitive, developmental, political, among others, in which
the totality of reading is counterpoised to the totality of (usually) television but also
‘video nasties’ and rock music. Children are often seen as fairly helpless and passive
524 RADIO, TELEVISION, FILM, AUDIO AND VIDEO