Speakers at a seminar on good quality children’s television, organised last week by the Commissioner for Children and the Broadcasting Authority, pointed fingers at local television stations which, they claimed, were failing miserably in this respect.

One of the speakers, Fr Joe Borg, hit the nail on the head when he said that the problem of mediocre television programmes is widespread across the whole spectrum of TV stations in Malta, and that programmes for adults are not any better.

There are various types of television programmes that Maltese children can watch. Today, with the introduction of cable television, they are exposed to so many more programmes than older generations of children were 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

Back then, children’s programmes were limited to one or two hours a day, on perhaps three or four television stations, including the foreign ones. At the time many parents were against the idea of allowing children to watch robot wars as it was believed that they would have instilled a sense of violence.

Today, children have at least five channels transmitting programmes aimed directly at them, while other foreign and local stations still have one or two hours of programmes targeted at young children. And, although the robot wars are no longer there, it cannot be said that the quality of children’s programmes has improved. If anything, it has become worse.

What the seminar was interested in was what local television stations are producing for our kids. It did not go into what the so-called children’s channels are transmitting 24 hours a day, as the scenario would have been even more negative, considering that for most of the time these transmit cartoon programmes which do not set a good example for children to follow.

But that is another issue, although even in such cases it is believed that parents and guardians should exercise a lot of caution in deciding what to allow their children to watch and what not to.

The seminar concentrated on what local television stations are producing for the young generation, and the overall picture that emerged last week was not good at all. This means that the local television stations are not doing enough to produce programmes of good quality for children.

The situation must be addressed and speakers at the seminar came up with different suggestions that are worth following. Broadcasting Authority chairman Kevin Aquilina, for example, presented what he described as a strategy aimed to improve the quality of programming for children.

His main two suggestions were to set up a Quality Children’s Programming Commission and a Quality Children’s Broadcasting Fund, two separate entities that would have however a similar aim – that of seeing that children are offered programmes that cater for their needs.

The commission would give free advice to broadcasting stations, advertisers and production houses, and would be also responsible for programme selection and programme monitoring. Dr Aquilina suggested that local stations should be obliged to broadcast a minimum number of good quality programmes for children.

As for the fund, he proposed that it should receive a percentage of TV licence fees to be redistributed among broadcasters and independent production houses. The fund should also receive part of the advertising budget of each station to be given back to the said stations to compensate for lack of advertising during children’s programmes.

It is hoped that such suggestions will not fall on deaf ears, but are followed up, perhaps fine-tuned, to be able to make a step forward in this direction. We cannot continue to ignore the problem because it can only get worse.

Children’s programmes need to be entertaining to be attractive, but not at the expense of being

informative and educational. Quality should not be sacrificed.