Friday, January 18, 2008

Last Friday's Newsround at 5.25pm began with an item all about Liverpool:-

Ellie: First to Liverpool, where a yearlong party is about to kick off. Thousands of people are on their way to the city, so we sent Helen to find out what's going on.

Helen: If you're in Liverpool tonight expect to go home with a stiff neck. There's a massive performance, and a lot of it is taking place on the rooftops. There'll be people up there, people behind me, thirteen hundred performers in all. And this is just the start of a yearlong festival event designed to show off Liverpool's best bits. Owen, Nicole and Harriet showed me some of them.


Phil Redmond, TV producer and creator of Grange Hill, was questioned recently by The Guardian about his role in Liverpool's City of Culture celebrations. When asked what he would be doing if he wasn't working on this, Phil responded: I was going to say I'd be driving through Grange Hill's 30th anniversary celebrations, but that wouldn't be true. The BBC has abandoned what Grange Hill was about in order to attract viewers aged six to 12 rather than its traditional 13-plus constituency, so there's nothing to celebrate.

Phil went on to agree that he felt the BBC had strangled his baby.

Phil Redmond's words don't just apply to Grange Hill, but to CBBC generally. There are virtually no programmes aimed at older kids, even taking into account the derisory amount of TV airtime on the new teen brand - BBC Switch.

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