Sesame Tree, ‘Glocalisation’ and Reconciliation:

Northern Ireland according to Sesame Street, and

Children’s Television in Commercial Hegemony

Wai-Lun Tsang

Module Code: MED815

Student ID: xxxxxxxxxxx

This document has been censored: Some details and/or allegedly confidential information have been omitted. This is a Masters level thesis, which attained a distinction grade. If you need to cite any part of it, it is advisable to seek the original, unmolested document, which should be freely available to students and researchers from the University of Ulster library on request.

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, School of Media, Film and Journalism,

the University of Ulster at Coleraine, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

of Master of Arts, Film and Television Management and Policy, 2009

i

Declaration

I hereby declare that with effect from the date on which the dissertation is

deposited in the Library of the University of Ulster I permit the Librarian of the

University to allow the dissertation to be copied in whole or in part without

reference to me on the understanding that such authority applies to the provision of

single copies made for study purposes or for inclusion within the stock of another

library. This restriction does not apply to the copying or publication of the title and

abstract of the dissertation. IT IS A CONDITION OF USE OF THIS DISSERTATION THAT

ANYONE WHO CONSULTS IT MUST RECOGNISE THAT THE COPYRIGHT RESTS WITH

THE AUTHOR AND THAT NO QUOTATION FROM THE DlSSERTATION AND NO

INFORMATION DERIVED FROM IT MAY BE PUBLISHED UNLESS THE SOURCE IS

PROPERLY ACKNOWLEDGED.

Wai-Lun Tsang

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

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Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................iii

Abstract.................................................................................................................. iv

Preface ....................................................................................................................v

1. Introduction: the BBC, Sesame Tree and Kids’ TV in a Commercial Hegemony..... 1

2. Background: Imperialism and the Socio-Historical Conditions that Grew the

Sesame Tree ......................................................................................................... 14

3. The ‘Glocal’ Processes of the Sesame Tree Project ............................................ 27

4. Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 40

Appendix.............................................................................................................. 43

References............................................................................................................ 45

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my family and friends, advisors and peers, colleagues and

contributors, all the people at the Sesame Workshop, the University of Ulster,

Sixteen South and Inferno Productions, including the following to name just a few:

Dr. Cahal McLaughlin, Prof. Máire Messenger Davies, Ronan McCloskey, Eamonn

Murphy, Laura Mailey, Vicky Bevis, Ian McDonald, Candida Julian Jones, Ian Nugent,

Colin Williams, Nilesh Panse, Dez McCarthy, Judy Wilson, Colin Devenny, Michael

Beattie, Greg Higgins, Simon Edwards, Ripley, Stephanie Needham, Mark Casey,

Alan Jones, and Janet Allen.

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Abstract

An examination of the very first Northern Irish member of the Sesame Street global

‘family’ of Sesame Workshop television programmes, providing an insight into the

programme-making processes from a global and local perspective, including some

accounts and reviews from the lead editor of the Sesame Tree series, the author of

this paper. This document provides an overview of the commercial pressures

children’s television programmes and programme-makers face, and examines the

fine balances between didacticism, cultural imperialism and protectionism in

providing children’s media messages, in particular, within the Sesame Workshop

international co-productions. It also provides a discourse of Glocalisation as both a

globalising (proliferating) and pedagogical strategy. It also provides a socio-

historical context to the Sesame Workshop’s interventionist stance of moral

didacticism and multiculturalism, which has given rise to co-productions that are

geared towards conflict resolution and reconciliation in conflict and post-conflict

countries or failed states. Some events in American civil rights, and Northern Irish

history, sectarianism and racism, are given as a backdrop; socio-historical factors

that have been key to why the Sesame Tree series came about.

Keywords:

Sesame Street, Northern Ireland, Sesame Tree, Sesame Workshop, CTW, BBC,

children’s television, Globalisation, Globalization, Transnationalism, Glocalisation,

Glocalization, Multiculturalism, Ethnocentrism, British, Irish, American, cultural

imperialism, The Troubles, conflict, peace, reconciliation, civil rights, sectarianism,

racism, moral didacticism, interventionism, pedagogy, education, intellectual

property, commodification, commercial hegemony, homogeneity, neoliberalism,

Rechov Sumsum, Shara’a Simsim, Israel, Palestine

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Preface

Like “death and taxes”1, one of those immutable certainties in life seems to be the

gaping chasm forming between academia and practice when engaging in any

discursive endeavour. But as both a Media scholar and media professional – an

editor by trade with experience in virtually all areas of preproduction, production

and postproduction – I hope I can narrow that gap a little, towards a relevant and

conscientious praxis. For the simple reasons of common sense and common

courtesy, there are certain details I must omit, work colleagues I should not

unwittingly perturb, and maybe even some litigious entities from which I must

protect others and myself. In a small way, this illustrates that there is no respite

from commercial pressure, even in academia.

The pervasiveness of commercial influences upon creativity is a well-trodden

subject, and one that often infers some sinister control and lasso over creative

freedom. Suspicion befalls the commercial world, or the world of market forces:

‘market’ is articulated with ‘force’, as if choices are manipulated and imposed upon

us by something invisible. Thus, it is easy to gravitate towards theories of

conspiracy, but I am both wary and sceptical of such ideas. The first concern of this

dissertation is not how a television production is forced to go one way or another,

but how it flows. Perhaps commercial hegemony is not defined by market forces,

but by market flow. In short, I am interested in the organisation of informal and

formal structures in the collaborative process of television development, and how

that affects creative goals. I am also interested in how such commercial structures

and hegemony proliferate and sustain themselves. Chapter one describes the

context of television as a business, examining its operation as a creative industry in

a global context, and proffers a foundation to understanding television programme

1 In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy on 13 November 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “… in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

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making and development, with a specific comparison of the Sesame Workshop and

BBC cultural histories.

Investigating the affects of commercialism in children’s television stirs up

some ideological questions that often perturb parents and guardians. Nevertheless,

this is the world we are born into, and one we must learn to live in. To borrow from

Carmen Luke, “[c]ommodification and consumerism are... the root logics of

everyday life at work, at home, and at play in any capitalist order” (1994, p. 313). In

short, the world of adults has an entrance fee. The market flows, diverts and

spreads, but the proliferation of capitalist ideology is not the be all and end all. It is

more often than not a means to carry other messages on top of messages. The

messages are pleural and polysemic. To cite David Buckingham writing in the

journal, Children's Geographies, “economic domination does not necessarily

translate directly into ideological or cultural domination” (2007, p. 47). Having said

that, conversely, one might also argue that although commercial hegemony can be

a conduit for and carrier of many other ideas, one could argue that its proliferation

follows a pattern more akin to a parasite, than a symbiote.

The discursive arguments that naturally follow are examined in chapter two,

providing a detailed socio-historical background to the Sesame Workshop’s

programme adaptations, their political influences, motivations and global ambitions.

It explores how a spinoff from an American non-profit franchise managed to finally

infiltrate a previously resistant British Broadcasting Corporation and public service

broadcaster. Contextualised and briefly touched upon in chapter one, to “the

astonishment of the Industry”, the original Sesame Street series was turned down by

the BBC’s Monica Sims, who found the use of filmmaking techniques common in

advertising, “offensive” (Inglis, 2003, p. 79). Chapter two explores Sesame Tree as a

paradigm of the Sesame Workshop’s ability to create spinoffs to specifically target

what they see as issues particular to a nation or country, and also how it can

proliferate its brand via ‘glocalisation’. Glocalisation, in terms of television, simply

means the processes involved in the local adaption(s) of global media messages

(Buckingham, 2007, p. 50). Some key events in American and Northern Irish civil

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rights histories, which seem to have mirrored each other in many vital aspects, are

given as a possible reason for the Sesame Workshop’s interventionist stance in

recent years, which has lead to more questions of American, and cultural

imperialism. Nevertheless, without this stance it is unlikely that the Sesame Tree

series would have come about. Some of the Sesame Workshops international co-

productions, such as those in Kosovo, Israel and Palestine, which are geared

towards conflict resolution, reconciliation, and mutual respect, bear strategic

resemblances to Sesame Tree, Northern Ireland.

Focusing mainly on multiculturalism in terms of sectarianism, racism and

methods of promoting tolerance, chapter three provides a review of Sesame Tree in

terms of both content and practice. Each episode has specific educational goals as

set out by the Sesame Workshop, in consultation with the Northern Ireland

curriculum. Chapter three examines a few of the episodes that are more pointedly

directed towards difference and mutual respect. As the lead editor of the series, I

hope to provide some insight into the reasons and decision-making behind some

story examples.

In closing, although examples of media messages geared toward children

will be explored, ultimately I doubt there will be any final conclusions about what

messages are best for children. To state the obvious, opinions differ infinitum. I

think it prudent to leave that debate up to the reader.

1

1. Introduction: the BBC, Sesame Tree and Kids’ TV

in a Commercial Hegemony

Understanding the way in which television is operated, financed, and controlled as a business

is essential to understanding the medium and its messages.

(Leibert & Sprafkin, 1988, p. 21)

When Robert Leibert and Joyce Sprafkin posited a key to understanding television in

The Early Window: Effects of Television on Children and Youth, their statement

tacitly acknowledged that, regardless of genre or target audience (TV intended for

adult or junior consumption), television is fundamentally a business. Ergo, as a

subset, children’s television, together with its educational content, falls within the

domain of business. This chapter proffers a brief outline of children’s television in a

global context. It explores the business of selling education, the tensions between

commercial and public service broadcasting, government policy and intellectual

property as a commodity. I think it is important to provide a brief overview of the

broadcasting climate in the United Kingdom, in particular with respect to the BBC

and its role as Britain’s public service broadcaster, and its operation within a global,

commercial hegemony. After which, the ambivalent and difficult schism in the BBC’s

desire to compete, and its desire to be independent from the influences of the

competitive, commercial broadcasting ecology can be explored. The Sesame

Workshop finally found its way to BBC National (onto BBC2 and CBBC – ‘CBeebees’),

after xxxxxx BBCNI (Northern Ireland regional) as a xxxxxxxxxxx in 2008, with

Northern Ireland’s Sesame Tree series. Sesame Street did make it to a United

Kingdom audience in the Seventies via commercial broadcaster ITV and later

Channel 4, but only after rejection by the BBC (Inglis, 2003, p. 78). The latter half of

this chapter explores the context of the rejection, and deals with the issues of

cultural barriers and biases tied up in issues of pedagogy, commerce and

globalisation.

2

In the world of commerce, education can be treated as a commodity for

trade; ‘commodified’ (Rushkoff, 2004)2 like any other intellectual property. Such

controlling parameters demand the collective acquiescence of public and private

corporations, programme-makers, managers and individual talent. They also require

legislation by the state or government: Rules must be adhered to and enforced for

the system to function. Intellectual property (IP), something that can be copied and

disseminated with great ease in the digital age, must artificially be made scarce and

protected by laws (Czerniawska & Potter, 1998, p. 7). In what has been dubbed, the

Creative Industries (DCMS, 2009, p. 4), IP is simply, yet another tradable commodity.

This alludes to a hypothesis that the structures that corral and control all creativity

in television are inescapably market driven. This includes television and indeed all

media, aimed towards children, plus their associated media messages.

The massive scale of that global, children’s media market can scarcely be

better exemplified than by the market values of the big four, “global broadcasting

powerhouses” (Havens, 2007), all of whom are American majority stake

conglomerates, namely the Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Fox Kids, and Disney.3

The Walt Disney Company has a current market capitalisation of 48.7 billion US

Dollars (Bloomberg, 2009), just two years after the start of the credit crisis (Authers,

2009)4. In November 2007, before the recession took a major toll, Disney had a

Market cap of 65 billion USD. A staggering “forty-six of the approximately 100

thematic television channels aimed at children were owned by one of these four

channel operators” (Havens, 2007). It is easy to see how America’s global economic

dominance is viewed with concern. That is not to say that this economic dominance

is not also a concern in the US domestically. The FCC (Federal Communications

2 ‘Commodification’ refers “to the way that market values can replace other social values, or the way a market can replace a communal system”, whereas ‘commoditization’ may refer specifically to “the way that goods that used to be distinguishable in terms of attributes end up becoming mere commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers” 3 Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Fox Kids respectively belong to Turner Broadcasting, Viacom, and Fox Television Entertainment. 4 According to “Adam Applegarth, then Chief executive of the stricken UK bank Northern Rock… August 9 marked the beginning of the credit crunch when BNP Paribas froze access to a large money market fund” (Authers, 2009).

3

Commission) acts as a watchdog and safeguard against solely market-driven output,

a role akin to Ofcom in the UK. Children’s television is defined by the FCC as

“programming that furthers the positive development of children 16 years of age

and under in any respect, including the child's intellectual/cognitive or

social/emotional needs” (FCC, 2008). The FCC serves to enforce ‘The Children's

Television Act’, enacted by Congress on October 18, 1990. One of the major goals

of the Act was to increase the quantity of educational and informational broadcast

television programming for children. The FCC “makes no distinction between

general audience/entertainment programs that serve children's educational and

informational needs and programs that are specifically designed to educate and

inform children”. Echoing a concern that “conglomerates exist simply to make

money by selling light escapist entertainment” (McChesney, 2002, p. 27), congress

determined that “market forces alone had not produced an adequate amount of

children's educational and informational programming on commercial television”

(FCC, 2008).

In the pursuit of higher profit margins, children’s media producers have

tended towards homogeneity, promoting a particular brand of family values,

claiming universality: Asserting “one’s programming taps into universal themes is

first and foremost a business strategy, not a cultural analysis” (Havens, 2007). To

cite David Buckingham, “as they increasingly engage with world markets, Disney

and other cultural producers are having to suppress elements that might be

perceived to be too culturally specific in favour of those that seem to speak to some

universal, trans-cultural notion of childhood” (2007, p. 48). As a consequence live

actors are replaced with puppets and animated characters to “overcome racial and

ethnic differences among exporting and importing cultures” (Havens, 2007).

Fantasy characters can be racially indeterminate, be easily redubbed, repackaged

and marketed to other territories. Non-human characters can speak with any

language, any accent and hail from any region, country, planet or fantastic realm.

Nevertheless it is precisely this tendency towards fantasy characters and

anthropomorphic personalities that the Sesame Workshop uses, only the Muppets’

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primary role is to educate, not solely to entertain and merchandise – although it

does all three very well. Though Jim Henson would later claim he simply liked the

sound of the name, the general consensus is that Muppets came from a

combination of the words, ‘puppet’ and ‘marionette’ (Finch, 1993, p. 18), which

helped galvanise their anthropomorphosis, providing them with a distinct identity,

even race. I recall a casual conversation with xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

whilst editing an episode some time in 2008, when xxxxxx advised never to call the

characters puppets: The Sesame people really don’t like that. This is a key

distinction. Muppets are not just puppets; they aspire to be real in the sense that

they want to engage with the real world, live and interact with real children and

adults. A Muppet may even one day be able to die. South Africa’s Takalani Sesame

(2000) engaged with the difficult subject of HIV and AIDS in 2002, with Kami, a

Muppet who is HIV positive (Sesame Workshop, 2007, pp. 3, 33). With Kami, the

Sesame Workshop identified a specific social issue and tackled it in a commendably

inventive way. Kami is not simply a fantasy character; she is a character with a

potentially fatal disease, and what is more, she is African, but she is neither black,

nor white (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). The Sesame Workshop adopted

commercial techniques of for an educational agenda.

Television’s commercialism has been an ongoing global concern, and

despite the BBC’s Public Service remit, it has received the same criticism as its

commercial counterparts. In a recent report from the Centre for Policy Studies,

Martin Le Jeune lambasts the BBC as a “me-too broadcaster with a serial record of

imitation” (2009, p. 26), citing reality TV, phone vote formats from Channel 4 and

ITV, and twenty-four hour news from Sky News as examples. However, Jason Deans,

writing for the Guardian, plainly ascribes the Centre for Policy Studies as a

“rightwing thinktank [sic]” (2009), suggesting that Le Jeune’s erstwhile role as BSkyB

head of public affairs may be skewing his views towards a less than dispassionate

polemic. Deans points out that the argument is an old one, citing an unnamed BBC

spokesperson who asserts, “the most recent research shows that the public want

more, not less from the BBC, and in particular hugely value our wide range of

5

popular programming which Le Jeune would like to see given away to commercial

operators” (ibid.). Despite the riposte from the anonymous BBC representative, the

statement does not refute or even repudiate Le Jeune’s main thrust that the BBC is

using funds from the license fee to rehash commercial formats; using public money

to compete with the private sector. In the September 2001 edition of The Modern

Law Review, the BBC was praised for its “standard-setting role”, all but exonerating

it from European Community constraints and normal fair-trading practices due to its

“enormous importance for the media ecology not only culturally but economically”

(Born & Prosser, 2001, p. 687). Eight years on (at the time of this writing), scholars,

professionals and commentators have been revisiting the license fee debate as the

BBC diversifies onto other digital media in a tentative economic climate. The ‘old

arguments’ of unfair competition and commercialism versus public service have

been transposed to the BBC’s online developments:

The BBC has been given a general licence to experiment with and to deliver online services,

which are now among the most widely used Internet services. This raises the question of

whether they are acting within their public service remit, whose legal definition is based on

broadcasting under analogue conditions. (Ahlert & Ariño, 2004, p. 405)

Those sentiments were echoed by News Corp CEO, James Murdoch at the Marketing

Society’s AGM in London on 24 April 2008. Criticizing the BBC’s iPlayer, Murdoch

said, “I'm not saying it is a bad product, but I am saying it does crowd out

competition and innovation”. The BBC Trust, the BBC’s independent oversight body

promptly responded the following day stating that the “BBC Trust subjected the BBC

iPlayer to a rigorous Public Value Test that included a Market Impact Assessment

carried out by Ofcom” (Williams, 2008). Murdoch’s perspective is understandable, if

not slightly hypocritical given his father’s legacy. Commercial pressure is something

that the BBC can opt to forego. Ofcom has regularly assessed the BBC’s commercial

impact. A recent report examining the BBC’s latest attempt to future proof and

follow the wave of digital convergence by moving into ‘Local Video Services’; a

technology that, for example, can provide very localised and up-to-date news, and

6

possibly citizen journalism (reports submitted by the public) over the Internet

(mobile or fixed). Ofcom concludes that the BBC will have a significant commercial

impact, further stating that the “introduction of the BBC service could also increase

the risk of investment projects – particularly in early years, before the full impact of

the service is known” (Ofcom, 2008, p. 209). In other words, the nascent quality of

the technology makes it even more high risk, further deterring commercial

investment. It is not difficult to imagine that entrepreneurial spirit would fade when

faced with a well-funded giant like the BBC. And yet, switching back to the BBC’s

side, one could argue that its moves onto the Internet are and have been simply

provide more accessibility. Part of the organisation’s charter is to build public value,

moving toward “a future where the public have access to a treasure-house of digital

content, a store of value which spans media and platforms, develops and grows

over time, which the public own and can freely use in perpetuity” (BBC, 2004, p. 5)

The license fee and Public Service Broadcasting debate ends here however,

as one of the principal discourses of this dissertation is not to single out the BBC or

contribute to the already gargantuan pile of papers on the matter. The question of

why the BBC is compelled to compete with commercial television is somewhat

rhetorical; echoing the opening hypothesis: The structures that corral and control

all creativity in television, and also its moves into digital convergence (and new

market territory, and potential), are inescapably market driven. The BBC seems

compelled to compete, alluding to a second aspect of the hypothesis. For good or

bad, there persists a commercial culture that is so pervasive and so normalised it is,

for all intents and purposes, an invisible and inescapable hegemony – one that is

reinforced consciously and unconsciously by an aforementioned collective

acquiescence. Despite being comparatively immune to the vicissitudes of

commercial broadcasting on an economic level locally (i.e. with respect to the other

UK terrestrial broadcasters), it seems that the BBC is compelled to compete because

it is immersed in a culture of commercial competition. CBBC commissioners are

asking, “[c]an you invent a global bestseller which is not creatively compromised?”

(BBC, 2009) Subsequently, children’s television programme makers, from producers

7

and managers to developers and writers, are seeking merchandisable, saleable

products to fit the commercial aspirations of commissioners. There is a top-down

instruction to make globally competitive children’s television, passed from

commissioner to producer, producer to developer, developer to writer, and fed back

and forth to ensure that that instruction is near gospel.

Competition was not always a concern for the BBC. In 1947, children’s

television was “a small, kindly offering from a relatively minor medium” (Inglis,

2003, p. 17), with a modest budget and equally modest aims. 1947 was only two

years after the war, and radio was the dominant broadcasting medium. A specific

BBC Children’s Department only emerged in 1951. The Corporation’s first Director-

General, “Lord Reith and his subalterns felt the need to shelter and heal the young”

(ibid.) in the immediate post-war broadcasting environment. The first inkling of

commercial concern for the BBC began when ITV started transmitting in 1955; when

the corporation ceased being the sole broadcaster in the television medium. In

1956, ITV began “importing some arresting American fare, which was slick and

nowhere near as tasteless as many at the Corporation had rather superciliously

considered it to be”5 (p. 36), and in the second quarter of 1956, ITV was attracting a

staggering three times more child viewers than the BBC.

The rise in what Lord Reed called, “compulsiveness” 6 (ibid. p. 40), or

eagerness for compulsive and popular viewing, seemed to be accompanied with a

commensurate rise in suspicion of American imports – perhaps also laced with a

little jealousy. Whether stemming from xenophobia, or perhaps some sort of

commercial hypnophobia with the presumption that the audiences were young, and

thus vulnerable and passive, concern regarding children’s television becoming too

commercial emerged early on. Although opinions are divided on how and what to

provide for children in terms of media messages, adults do at least agree on the

necessity to nurture and care for young minds: “the existence of such concerns is

universal” (Davies, 2004, p. 429), of an essentially human provenance, reinforced

5 Amongst the popular imports were Popeye, Hopalong Cassidy, and Lassie 6 From a BBC meeting held on 22 November 1960

8

with “a range of institutional provisions for children, all ultimately originating in

what could be seen as a biological evolutionary need for socialization and

protection (survival) and all invoking the responsibility of adult society, whether

corporate, state or personal (parents, community), for the care and moral training

of the young” (ibid.). In other words, the reaction to protect children is a biological

imperative, an ingrained trait that has been carried through into modern society.

Media globalisation is often associated with restriction of “people’s free space for

expression and thought,” (Hamelink, 2002, p. 39) violating “their privacy through

data mining and related data collection techniques,” and undermining “their

citizenship by perceiving them primarily as consumers”. From that preconception

therefore, it is unsurprising that when Sesame Street was created in the late 1960s,

the BBC refused to buy it, “not so much on ideological grounds as on the basis of

its style of pedagogy” (Buckingham, 2007, p. 51). What was seen as “‘advertising

techniques’ for drilling children in letter and number recognition was seen as

somehow at odds with the more child-centred, play-oriented British tradition of pre-

school education” (ibid.). Nevertheless, there is something a little loaded and

unsettling about the term, “British tradition”.

The BBC has been exercising cultural and economic protectionism in varying

degrees of severity over the years, perhaps attempting to preserve that so-called

‘British tradition’ in programme-making and media messages, blockading imports

and censoring messages going to impressionable minds. The head of children’s

programming for eleven years from 1967, Monica Sims, “showed no trace of regret”

(Inglis, 2003, p. 52) from the decision to reject Sesame Street, despite its

subsequent success on ITV and Channel 4: “Why diminish the chance of producing a

successful homegrown show by spending it in an inferior foreign product?” was the

way “her thinking went”, Inglis concludes. Sims saw too much of a cultural disparity

between British children, and the American, poverty-stricken preschoolers of inner

city New York whom Sesame Street was trying to reach. In that sense, the messages

that Sesame Street was trying to proliferate were not yet globalised enough. And yet

that globalisation is very often now at the heart of debate, and “Americanness”, as

9

Buckingham puts it, has become “the default position, something so universal and

so unquestioned that it has become effectively invisible” (2007, p. 48).

However, to reiterate Buckingham as prefaced (p. vi), “economic domination

does not necessarily translate directly into ideological or cultural domination” (p.

47). The Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), which rebranded as the Sesame

Workshop in 2000, was a subsidiary of National Educational Television, the

predecessor of the America PBS (Public Broadcast Service) (Morrow, 2006, p. 5). In

the words of Malcolm Gladwell, CTW’s founding producer, Joan Ganz Cooney,

wanted to create an “educational virus… a learning epidemic to counter the

prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy” (2000, p. 89). Gladwell’s biological

analogy is useful in that it suggests that Cooney was able to inject her pedagogical

ideologies into the commercial hegemony, to proliferate educational values. Her

approach was both pragmatic and guerrilla in style, exploiting the strengths of

television, the way it operates as a business, leveraging its ability to grab attention

and reach out to a large population, and to do so cheaply, transmitting educational

messages inside a colourful, commercial package. Quite simply, CTW “borrowed

techniques from children’s commercials to teach” (ibid. p. 90), hiring Jim Henson,

who already had a long career in television creating TV spots for children’s and

variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show, producing over 300 advertisements for

Wilkins Coffee company, and much more besides (Finch, 1993, pp. 1-49). Explaining

his success, Jim Henson said,

[advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over

on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people

laugh. (ibid. p. 22)

In a 1968, Sesame Street pitch film, speaking of their production approach, David

Connell said, “we’re planning to treat them the same way, essentially the same way,

a commercial enterprise would create a campaign, but we're trying to sell the

alphabet to preschool children” (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Sesame

Street successfully sold pro-learning values, making education entertaining and

10

attention grabbing, and “every time the show has been tested – and Sesame Street

has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any other television show in

history – it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers”

(Gladwell, 2000, p. 91).

Sesame Street is a paradigm of demographically malleable polysemy (cf.

Fiske, 1988, p. 126), which presents advantages from a viewpoint of audience

appeal, possessing traits appealing to both children and adults. As the series has

expanded and grown, so has its audience along with it. Sesame Street has an

extensive back catalogue appreciated by children and also adults seeking some

laughs and nostalgia, or to borrow from the words of Buckingham, those seeking

“opportunities for nostalgic fantasies about their own past” (1997, p. 286). In a

display of business naivety and lack of foresight, in the Seventies, “the BBC

destroyed three-quarters of its film and video archives… they had no conception of

the rolls of cash they were almost literally burning along with the celluloid spools”

(Inglis, 2003, p. 29). At the time, the work of the Children’s Television Workshop

was years ahead of the BBC Children’s Department in every facet, from business

sense to conceptual design and pedagogical research. What the BBC’s Monica Sims

saw as “offensive”, just “jingles and repetition – the rhythm of commercial

advertising” (ibid. p. 79), was in fact “deliberately and painstakingly engineered”

(Gladwell, 2000, p. 100), using pioneering quantitative research in conjunction with

expertise from experienced television producers. Sesame Street’s key personnel

included former executive producer of Captain Kangaroo, David Connell, and

Edward L. Palmer, who headed internal research (Morrow, 2006, pp. 67-84). Captain

Kangaroo won a Peabody Award at a time of growing concern that children’s

television was becoming far too commercialised. The 1957 award lauded the

programme as “almost the only genuine children’s program on network television,

certainly the only one that puts the welfare of the children ahead of that of the

sponsor… without interrupting the serious business of entertaining them at the

same time” (ibid. pp. 20-21). The juxtaposition of the words ‘serious business’ and

‘entertaining’ is quite a telling one, and an important example of the normalised

11

articulation and equation of ‘business’ with ‘entertainment’. In other words, to

borrow from Máire Messenger Davies, “[m]any of us persist in trying to ‘improve’

our children through ‘educational’ activities, overlooking (and surely forgetting) that,

for a child, the best toy, the best game, the best story and the best programme, is

one that is fun” (1989, p. 135). The Peabody Award was not only recognising of the

value of Captain Kangaroo, but it was also tacitly acknowledging that ‘business’,

‘education’, and ‘entertainment’ could co-exist. Sesame Street took the instinctive,

television expertise of the likes of Jim Henson and David Connell, and combined it

with academic expertise.

Extensive studies in the 1960s and 70s by Elizabeth Lorch, and in particular

Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts who also acted as a consultant

on Captain Kangaroo, found that children were very sophisticated and selective in

their television viewing. One study took a re-edited episode of Sesame Street with

selected key scenes out of order. “If kids were only interested in flash and dash”

(Gladwell, 2000, p. 101); the colourful action that Sims found so objectionable, then

“that shouldn’t have made a difference”. However, it did make a difference. Lorch

and Anderson found that if the children could not make sense of what they were

seeing, they stopped watching. Another study took two groups of five-year-olds in a

Sesame Street screening. One group was placed in a room with many attractive toys,

and the other without. Quite predictably they found that the former group paid less

attention to the episode, about 47% of the time to the TV, whilst the latter group

watched about 87% of the time. However, when tested for understanding of the

episode, the two groups managed the same test results; both assimilated

information equally well. Lorch and Anderson concluded that the children in the

toys group watched strategically, stating that the toy group children were

“distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they look at what

for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so

affective that the children could gain no more form increased attention” (ibid.). The

ramifications of both studies together, dispelled the assumption that children were

a passive audience. In television’s early history, it was not commonly held that

12

audiences are active. That is, children can pick and choose to be engaged in other

activities or thoughts during an advertisement break (Anderson, et al. 2003, p. 278).

Children look away when they were bored, and to borrow conclusions from

qualitative audience research conducted by Buckingham, Hannah and Kelly, “[b]eing

boring – while it means different things for different children... - [is] a cardinal

signifier of a lack of cultural value” (2000, p. 19). By extension, in Gladwell’s words,

“Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold

the attention of children, you can educate them” (2000, p. 100). That statement

seems tautological, but it also seems to be a simple lesson often forgotten or

ignored: To reiterate Davies, “the best programme, is one that is fun” (1989, p. 135).

Albert Einstein is supposed to have once said, “[t]oo many of us look upon

Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated

thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves” (Wikiquote, 2009). From Sims

comments, she may have shared that preconception. And to summarise on what

has already been alluded to, the major factor in the BBC’s decision to reject Sesame

Street was not solely on commercial or pedagogical grounds, it seems that it was on

what Inglis described as, “residual anti-Americanism… They [the BBC] were public

service broadcasters, after all, and proud of their non-commercial, homegrown [sic]

output” (2003, p. 80). It can be argued that the constant that has placed Sesame

Street at loggerheads with the BBC’s home-grown children’s television was, and still

is, a continued suspicion of a particular articulation of ‘Americaness’, that being

American commercialism. The connotations of the term ‘Americaness’ have been

mutable, but always derived from a position of competition – intellectual,

ideological, and commercial. From an external, non-American standpoint, there is a

governmental obligation to determine law and policy to the benefit of each nation

state. The BBC is seen as the British public service broadcaster. However, to reprise

the preface to this chapter, commercial hegemony can function as a medium in

itself, not just as a proliferator of itself, but also a conduit for, and carrier of, many

other messages. That is not to say that the tendency has not been toward a

particular effacement of diversity espoused by the dominant ‘big four’ media

13

producers. As was felt very early on by the BBC and what continues to be, “a key

issue is ‘cultural invasion’ of imported programmes, mostly of American origin,

which has actually become greater with the increase of dedicated children’s

channels” (Davies & Thornham, 2007, p. 16). The commercial threat to global

diversity as been internationally recognized and ratified by the UN Convention on

the Rights of the Child held in 1989. Articles 17 and 297, in relation to the Sesame

Workshop, are of particular focus in the following chapter. Sesame Street has

assuaged the persistent fear of homogenisation within the commercial hegemony

by adapting itself according to the curricula and perceived needs of each nation

state. Having its origins from a time of great civil and political turmoil in the United

States, it has always been multicultural. By adapting and working with local

producers, it has grown more and more multicultural. And in 2008, Sesame Street

paved its way to Northern Ireland via the Sesame Tree series.

7 See appendix.

14

2. Background: Imperialism and the Socio-Historical

Conditions that Grew the Sesame Tree

I think the question of cultural imperialism is a good one, and one that we’re contending with

all the time. And I think, what we like to think is that… we’re engaging in a model that takes

a framework that’s worked here, and worked in other places, that then other people can adapt.

Charlotte F. Cole8 (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006)

After narrowly averting a nuclear holocaust in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

the late Sixties and early Seventies, were no less a tumultuous time, with the Civil

Rights Movement, anti-war protests, Cambodian Campaign and Vietnam War to

name just a few of the most prominent events in recent American history: “This was

the Sixties, and every night you would turn your television set on and the news

would tell you, cities were burning, leaders were being assassinated, riots were

being held at universities (anti-war riots), and so it was as if people were saying, ‘so

do something,’ to the television set”, recalled Joan Ganz Cooney (ibid.). In a sense,

the climate of civil unrest coupled with middle-class complaints of television’s over-

commercialism, was the catalyst that galvanised and synergised educational, public,

broadcast, charitable and government agencies (cf. Morrow, 2006, pp. 26-29). The

Sesame Street project secured over $8 million for its first two years of development

between 1968 and 1970. The top five contributors were, the Office of Education,

Research Bureau ($3,325,000), the Ford Foundation ($1,538,000), the Carnegie

Corporation ($1,500,000), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($625,900), and

the Office of Economic Opportunity, ‘Head Start’ ($625,000) (ibid. p. 62). With both

public and private support, Sesame Street was the most expensive children’s

television series ever televised at that time, first airing in the US in November 1969.

The resources devoted to the development of Sesame Street were testament to the

mood of desperation – a public and private consensus that action had to be taken. 8 Charlotte F. Cole, PhD. is Vice President of Education & Research at the Sesame Workshop

15

In 1964, “President Lyndon B. Johnston convened the Kerner Commission to

examine television to see if it induced violence in its viewers” (Inglis, 2003, pp. 77-

78). Its academic veracity notwithstanding, “the Commission announced in a

Surgeon-General’s report ‘that violence… on television did affect behaviour

adversely’”. This paved the way for subsequent support for more didactic and

interventionist forms of programme-making: To cite Carmen Luke, “[w]hether 17th-

century religious or secular school books, 18th-century travelogues, nursery-verse

or story books, or 1940s and 1950s comic books – the aim of children’s books and

children’s literacy has always been to tame the uncivilized, pre-literate unruly child

through pedagogical and moral didacticism” (1994, p. 308). Perhaps “1950s comic

books” are slightly inappropriate analogues given Robert Hutchins’ criticism of

television during those years: “It is as though movable type has been devoted

exclusively since Gutenberg’s time to the publication of comic books” (Inglis, 2003,

p. 77). Hutchins was not only a well-respected innovator in the field of education,

but also the associate director of the Ford Foundation, the second highest funding

contributor. Nonetheless, Luke’s argument has credence. Sesame Street was a

prototype, didactic ‘framework’ that would eventually, and very quickly in fact, be

exported and adapted to other countries across the globe, fuelling more debate

over America’s cultural imperialism.

Cooney likens the role of the Sesame Workshop producers with that of, in

her words, “old fashioned missionaries”, not disseminating religion, but spreading

the values of “learning and tolerance and love and mutual respect” (Goldstein

Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Although altruistic in motivation and intention,

Cooney’s statement draws parallels with an “interventionist post-colonial

imperialism” (Schiller, 2005, p. 450), which is problematic for the Sesame

Workshop’s need to disassociate itself from the cultural or American imperialism

that Charlotte Cole alludes to in the opening quotation of this chapter: In centuries

past, “missionaries served as ideological agents of imperial rule, legitimating the

right of the imperial power to transform local belief systems and impose its values,

standards, laws, and interests outside the borders of its state” (ibid. p. 449).

16

However, to reiterate Cooney, Sesame Street is not spreading religion, and is careful

to mitigate any suggestions of cultural imperialism by working closely with local

producers, writers and crew. In short, the Sesame Workshop was a pioneering

practitioner of ‘glocalism’, “characterized by the exclusive predominance of global

flows moving through localities, which have frequently broken down their structures,

bending them to their interests and to their strategies” (Bressi, 2003, p. 5).

American professor of Anthropology, Nina Glick Schiller would categorise this

strategy as a subset of Transnationalism, distinct from Globalism, where

Globalisation “refers to periods of relatively increased unequal integration of the

world through capitalist production, distribution, marketing, and consumption”,

whereas in Transnational Studies, “State actors and institutions are understood to

be important participants in shaping but not limiting the social, cultural, economic,

and political linkages of people” (2005, p. 440). This is a useful distinction in

examining the phenomenon of glocalisation, as it may cast off some of the

connotations typically articulated with older colonialist, imperialist and capitalist

models of globalisation.

The extensively researched ‘CTW Model’9 (Morrow, 2006, pp. 67-84) or

Sesame Workshop approach, with its ingrained messages of tolerance and mutual

respect, pre-empted and tapped into a global desire expressed in the principles of

the United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child, held in November 1989.

Article 29.1 (d) states that education should prepare “the child for responsible life in

a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes,

and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and

persons of indigenous groups” (Hamelink, 2002, p. 35). The charter was “ratified by

191 of the 193 UN member states” (von Feilitzen, 2002, p. 16), demonstrating a

consensus towards messages for a universal altruism, but also distinct from

universalism or homogeneity, acknowledging that education should also be directed

to (c) the “development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural

9 Since rebranding in 2000, Sesame Workshop literature, presentations and so on, refers to the ‘CTW model’ as the ‘Sesame Workshop model’.

17

identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the

child is living, the country from which he or she may originate and for civilizations

from his or her own” (Hamelink, 2002, pp. 34-35). As long as the cultural identity

and values of (c) do not contradict the ethnic and cultural inclusivity of (d), then

there is no problem. However, cultural differences are more often than not, one of

the key obstacles of reconciliation in conflict, and recent post-conflict zones.

Mirroring and partly inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the States,

Northern Ireland’s civil rights struggles began most visibly in 1968 with the Derry

march. Killings of The Troubles had commenced two years prior and, needless to

say, escalated in more demonstrations, marches, riots and deaths10. Former head of

News and Current Affairs, and Chief Editorial Advisor at BBC Northern Ireland, Keith

Baker recalled, “through the hunger strikes, Gibraltar, Enniskillen, the Anglo-Irish

Agreement and all the loyalist protests which followed it, a particularly difficult time

for our reporting staff who were often attacked once the cameras were seen and the

letters ‘BBC’ mentioned” (1996, pp. 120-121): “‘B’ for British was a centre of

controversy” (ibid.), carrying with it the baggage of “imperialism, colonialism

sectarianism and state repression” (Rolston, 2007, p. 346). The late Keith Kyle,

former political and parliamentary correspondent for The Economist, and reporter

on the Tonight programme from 1969 to 1980, “was hardly a stranger to political

breakdown and civil strife”, having spent time as “a foreign correspondent in the

United States during the civil rights’ movement, in Africa and the Middle East” (1996,

p. 105). However, those countries were somewhat “exotic”, whereas Northern

Ireland was a domestic crisis. Conveying to the rest of the United Kingdom, that

part of the country “could involve the extensive use of violence, the burning of

houses, the expression of political views in vehemently sectarian terms” would

prove difficult. In David Butler’s words, “[t]here can be no impartial outcome where

the advance of one perspective may only be achieved at the expense of the other”

10 Due to necessary delimitation, some events are mentioned only in brief to contextualise discourse. A useful resource is the CAIN Web Service (Conflict Archive on the Internet, http://cain.ulst.ac.uk) based within the University of Ulster, containing information and source material on Northern Ireland conflict and politics.

18

(1996, p. 133). With so much history between, in and around the two traditions, and

multiple interpretations of anything said or done, a simple explanation would be

impossible. With political and logistical limitations, the “task was too huge for the

British media, so they settled on a fourth news value: ethnocentrism” (Rolston, 2007,

pp. 346-347).

As with the Civil Rights Movement in the States, Northern Ireland was not

singularly a matter of irrational hatred from some Hegelian notion of ‘otherness’

and identity affirmation, though that does play a role. “The civil rights

demonstrations were demanding full British rights, such as ending the system of

gerrymandering of local government constituencies and the unfair allocation of jobs

and housing and other resources on the basis of religion” (Kyle, 1996, p. 106).

Sesame Street first broadcast after American federal and government legislature

with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Immigration and Nationality Services Act of

1965, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and ’68 (The National Archives, 2009). In

Northern Ireland, the discrimination and inequality was still flagrantly ingrained

within the Repressive State Apparatus, the events of the Derry March in October

1968 just one of the more visible examples among many. RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís

Éireann), the Republic of Irelands’ public service broadcaster, was present at the

march to film the RUC’s (Royal Ulster Constabulary’s) heavy-handed use of force11.

Immediately following the demonstration, “there were two days of serious rioting in

Derry between the Catholic residents of the city and the RUC” (CAIN, 2009).

Coverage was worldwide. To cite Keith Kyle, violence is an “indispensable part of

the technique of non-violence… it becomes exceedingly difficult for television to be

both impartial and responsible, two ideals that usually run together” (1996, p. 108).

11 The NMNI (National Museums Northern Ireland) Ulster Museum in Belfast will be opening about forty new installations at the end of October 2009. I had the privilege to edit the archive footage for the museums audio-visual installations, which includes a montage of the Civil Rights March in Derry, 1968. Opening with the song ‘We Shall Overcome’, which became the anthem for the American Civil Rights Movement, the montage shows the RUC baton charge on peaceful but nevertheless deemed illegal demonstrators, intercut with interviews of MP Gerry Fitt after the march. The actual bloodied shirt that he wore on the march will also be on display (cf. http://www.nmni.com; cf. CAIN)

19

With the deployment of British soldiers in 1969, whom were initially

welcomed by the Catholic community since the RUC were so distrusted, followed by

the introduction of internment in 1971, relations between public and state rapidly

deteriorated. Of course, events have been drastically condensed to expedite and

delimit discourse, but the focal point for the moment is that “the state has a

definitive authority in establishing the limits of broadcasting in Britain” (Butler,

1996, p. 128), and as such, can be seen as one aspect and reflection of state policy.

As an example of the increasingly authoritarian stance of the state, leaping ahead

to October 1988, “objectivity… was dealt a severe blow” (Baker, 1996, p. 122) when

the Thatcher government introduced the ‘Broadcasting Ban’. “The ban affected 11

loyalist and republican organisations but Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA,

was the main target” (Welch, 2005). The BBC audaciously circumvented this by using

voice actors to overdub Sinn Féin statements.

Sesame Tree would not come about until a decade after the April 1998, Good

Friday Agreement12, which itself would not be drafted until after a thirty-year period

of violence, obfuscation, collusion between police and paramilitaries, secret

negotiations, and espionage (e.g. cf. CAIN 2009; cf. Police Ombudsman for

Northern Ireland, 1998). Belligerence would not be tamed “through pedagogical and

moral didacticism” (Luke, 1994, p. 308), as it was clear that the state was in need of

some reformations, and that the history, culture and politics were far more complex.

Northern Ireland’s Troubles were not simply result of ignorance and ethnocentrism.

From its inception, Sesame Street was inclusive and multicultural, “has aired for

nearly 40 years in the United States and now in over 120 other countries, [and] was

designed to promote respect and understanding among children of different

backgrounds” (Cole, et al. p. 359). Although, built on decades of pedagogical

research and testing with child audiences, it is ill equipped to deal with the

complexities of political and civil conflict. War is an adult game. Nevertheless, the

Sesame Workshop has aspirations to extend its remit to encompass issues of

12 cf. http://www.nio.gov.uk/the-agreement

20

conflict, if not conflict resolution, which can be seen as a natural progression for

the show that Cooney described as “a perpetual experiment” (Morrow, 2006, p. 161).

It has, however, run into difficulty because of it, a little over a decade ago with its

Middle Eastern adaptation of Sesame Street, Shara’a Simsim.

The Republican and Sinn Féin stance on Gaza, Palestine and Israel has been

to express solidarity with Palestinians, seeing parallels between Irish history and

that of the Middle East. It has in the past and more recently, left Sinn Féin open to

criticism of “stoking the fires of terrorism across the globe” (News Letter, 2009). In

the late Nineties, the Sesame Workshop “came to grief” with Shara'a Simsim, which

attempted to appeal to both Israeli and Palestinian children simultaneously “and

thus become a force for peace and reconciliation” (Inglis, 2003, p. 170). Combining

Arabic and Hebrew narration was highly problematic, as “each side tends to regard

the other’s language as the ‘language of death’”. However, Sesame Workshop’s

main misstep was the introduction of “a new character in the form of a thoughtful

Israeli soldier, designed to humanize the Israelis in the eyes of Palestinian viewers”.

It “was hastily scrapped when CTW’s own rulebook was found to forbid military

plotlines of any kind” (ibid. pp. 170-171). Dehumanisation is one of the inherent

qualities of wearing a uniform, especially a military one. Employing a “counter-

stereotypic” (Cole, et al. p. 411), humanising strategy to a figure of war and state

(oppressive or otherwise) can be construed, at best as bias, and worse, as

propaganda. In the case of Rechov Sumsum or Shara’a Simsim (Sesame Street in

Hebrew and Arabic respectively), and similar co-productions, the Sesame

Workshop’s plan is to support the process of peace at a “person-to-person level,

rather than at a political one” (ibid. p. 410). The didactic and pedagogical dilemma

confronted with each co-production is summed up by Sesame Workshop director of

international research, Elizabeth Nisbet’s consideration that, “[politics] has

everything to do with what we’re doing, but it also has nothing to do with what

we’re doing” (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Noam Chomsky would be less

kind. From a libertarian standpoint, Shara’a Simsim could be seen as neoliberal

propaganda, under a banner of a “so-called 'right' of humanitarian intervention”

21

(Chomsky, 2003, p. 14). Media activist and “Palestinian executive producer, Daoud

Kuttab, whose studio in Ramallah was damaged by Israeli soldiers” was sceptical of

the programme having any positive action: “‘You're telling them to be tolerant to

Israelis when Israeli tanks are outside their homes’” (Younge, 2002).

Without going into the intricacies of Jewish-American connections, reciprocal

voting at UN Security and General Council assemblies, financial and military aid,

America has a long-standing, ‘special relationship’ with Israel (Chomsky, 1999, pp.

48-53). To cite only a few examples of many, from “fiscal years 1978 through 1982,

Israel received 48% of all U.S. military aid and 35% of U.S. economic aid, worldwide”

and for fiscal year “1983, the Reagan administration requested almost $2.5 billion

for Israel out of a total aid budget of $8.1 billion, including $500 million in outright

grants and $1.2 billion in low-interest loans”. Chomsky sees Israel like the modern

equivalent of Sparta; “performing dirty work that the U.S. is unable to undertake

itself because of popular opposition or other costs” (ibid. p. 20); it is an important

geographical and military foothold in the Middle East. The point of these figures is

not solely to critique American foreign policy, but also to illustrate the United States’

transnational connections. America has had another ‘special relationship’ with

Britain since at least 1946, when Winston Churchill coined the term in a speech at

Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri (NATO Online Library, 2001). The Anglo-

American ‘special relationship’ has seen through many administrations, from

Churchill and Roosevelt, Macmillan and Kennedy, Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and

Major, to Blair, Clinton and Bush to name just a handful. Today we have Gordon

Brown and Barack Obama.

America also has connections with Ireland that run far and deep. The Irish-

American emigrants could be described as a “global tribe”; what Giovanni Bressi

describes as “‘diasporas’ of emigrants (or former emigrants) from all continents of

the world to all the continents of the world [whom] constitute very important

bridges of glocalization” (2003, p. 11). One such family of Irish Diasporas of great

significance were the Kennedys, who were probably the most famous of Irish-

American families. In 1963, the same year as his assassination, on his visit to

22

Ireland, “President John F. Kennedy joined with Irish President Eamonn de Valera to

form The American Irish Foundation” (The Ireland Funds, 2008). A little over four

decades on, the fund raised $1 million for the Sesame Workshop to help develop

Sesame Tree, Northern Ireland. Another Kennedy with direct significance to the Irish

peace process was the late Senator Edward M. ‘Ted’ Kennedy, who died from brain

cancer on August 25, 2009. In 1994, Ted Kennedy had lobbied Bill Clinton to ignore

objections from the John Major, Conservative government regarding Gerry Adams

being granted a US visa. The Senator was convinced that Adams and the Sinn Féin

leadership were “serious about steering the IRA away from the ‘armed struggle’ cul-

de-sac and into constitutional politics… seven months after Adams was finally

granted his US visa, the IRA declared its ceasefire on 31 August” (McDonald, 2009).

In November 1995, President William J. ‘Bill’ Clinton appointed George J. Mitchell as

special advisor to the president of the United States, and secretary of state for

economic initiatives in Ireland. His reports called for “phasing-out guerrilla weapons

in Northern Ireland” (Bowdoin College, 2004) and his role as mediator were

instrumental in the peace negotiations and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Mitchell described the Act as necessarily imperfect, in his words, “not in a sense a

final act but an important step in a process toward achieving the objective” (Watt,

2009). Probably of minute significance, but worth a mention as a curious

coincidental connection to children’s media, George Mitchell was a company

director of the Walt Disney Company from 1995, and Chairman of the Board from

2004 (The Walt Disney Company, 2009), up until 2007 (Holson, 2006). In 1999, he

received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour, for his work

in Northern Ireland (Altman, 2009) as well as an honorary knighthood from the

Queen. Appointed as special envoy to the Middle East by President Barack Obama, it

is hoped that he will “bring the same quiet determination to negotiations on the

Israeli-Arab front that he did as Bill Clinton's intermediary in the Troubles” (Watt,

2009).

Drawing parallels between Israeli-Palestinian and British-Irish relations,

Chomsky writes, “Northern Ireland… is far from a paradise but vastly improved over

23

the days when Britain ignored legitimate grievances in favor of force” (2003, p. 115).

In November 1990, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke

stated, “Britain had no ‘strategic or economic interest’ in Northern Ireland and

would accept unification of Ireland if that were the wish of the people of Northern

Ireland” (Rolston & McVeigh, 2007, p. 2). Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Prime Minister

Tony Blair’s New Labour government worked towards establishing a devolved,

power-sharing government in the North, eventually leading to the Good Friday

Agreement and “the Republic abandoning its claim to the whole island of Ireland by

dropping Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution” (ibid.). It seems that neither British

nor Irish states want the burden of Northern Ireland. In 2006, the St. Andrews

Agreement13 dealing with amendments to the original 1998 Good Friday Agreement

and, among other goals, the contentious issue of policing was incentivised with a

“pounds-for-powersharing package” worth £1 billion (McDonald, 2009). The

financial rewards would not be available without cross party unanimity: A simple

demonstration that the consequence or “result of self-centered localism is a lack of

development, the non-entrance or the exit from processes of modernization, and

the failure to grasp the opportunities offered by the scientific and technological

revolution underlying globalization” (Bressi, 2003, p. 7). Smaller, local examples of

incentivising gentrification are Social Development, Arts Council, and Community

Arts grants, some of which have been made available to paint over loyalist murals,

with the rationale being “that loyalism is to be killed with kindness” (Rolston &

McVeigh, 2007, p. 19). Sesame Tree is part of the same rationale, effectively a

Sesame Workshop donation to BBC Northern Ireland, and a provision of work for

local programme developers and television crew.

However, to reprise a now familiar theme of commercial hegemony, the

market can ebb as quickly as it can flow. During the frenzied UK housing market

boom that massively inflated in Belfast in particular, on a Nationalist-Loyalist

interface between Ardoyne and Glenbryn once dubbed “murder mile”, one four-

13 http://www.nio.gov.uk/northern_ireland_(_st_andrews_agreement)_bill.pdf

24

bedroom property placed on the market for an already turgid £285,000, reached a

ridiculous £800,000 at auction (Bowcott, 2007), presumably to redevelop as luxury

apartments. Then came the ‘credit crunch’ and house price crash, and the

worldwide economic downturn has demonstrated that “Northern Ireland remains

umbilically linked to the British subvention”; a “life-support machine reliance on the

UK Treasury” (McDonald, 2009), which is hardly an incentive for Irish reunification

and only goes to reinforce Peter Brooke’s statement that Britain has ‘no strategic or

economic interest’ in Northern Ireland. In the UK broadcasting ecology, the

recession has resulted in an “increasingly perilous state of investment in UK public

service programming” (Sweney, 2009) with children’s television hit the hardest. BBC

spending on children's programming fell from £97 million in 2004, to £77 million

by 2008, nearly a 21% drop. ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five spending on

homegrown children's programming in the same period fell by 70% (ibid.).

Nevertheless, or perhaps increasingly because of recession, Glocalism and

the “glocal approach... appears to have gained global recognition to an increasing

extent, particularly after the Twin Towers, the collapse of the new economy, the

crisis in international financial markets,” according to Bressi (2003, p. 9).

Prophetically writing in 2003, Bressi was concerned with “the emergence of a

serious risk of a world recession, and the prospect of potentially destabilizing

military conflict” (ibid.). Evidently, his concerns were predominantly due to the Bush

administration at that time, when “fear of the United States had reached remarkable

heights throughout the world, along with distrust of the political leadership”

(Chomsky, 2003, p. 4). President George W. Bush’s foreign policy stance had

become unapologetically interventionist after 9-11, which had a profound affect on

America’s world outlook. To quote Barbara (Basia) Nikonorow, Sesame Workshop

producer assigned to the Kosovo Co-Production: “After September 11th, we've seen

our company sort of take a new direction to embrace mutual respect and

understanding as a core curriculum in an even more apparent manner than we have

in the past” (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Sesame Street has even made

its way to Afghanistan with Koche Simsim, a redeveloped and redubbed version of

25

Alam Simsim, the Egyptian Sesame (USA Today, 2008). “The best thing parents who

want their children to grow up with liberal values can do is make sure there is a

liberal world for them to grow up in”, writes Gary Younge, who signs off his article

for the Guardian with, “[t]his column was brought to you by the letters P, E, A, C

and E, tragically complicated by the numbers 9 and 11” (2002).

By entering into conflict zones and failed states that are barely at the first

stages of peace processes, the Sesame Workshop runs the risk of inadvertently

making alliances with authoritarian, often American, repressive power. Sesame

Workshop’s extension of its remit to include media messages against belligerence

may be unconsciously ignorant of genuine struggles against oppression, distracting

attention from political grievance, reducing social injustices to ethnocentrism. By

blending pedagogy and moral didacticism with the commercial hegemony, using

the strengths of Transnationalism for altruistic media messages, the global ‘family’

of Sesame Street programmes may have unwittingly contributed to the evolution of

even more invisible and possibly insidious forms of commercial hegemony and

neoliberal imperialism. Gary E. Knell, president and CEO of Sesame Workshop said,

“Even hardened revolutionaries who have fought and been involved in difficult

political struggles don’t want to raise their children in that kind of environment”

(Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Perhaps the surrender of self-determination

really is the lesser of evils.

In the case of Sesame Tree Northern Ireland, by the time the series was

first aired in 2008, much of the major political squabbles had reached accord.

Additionally, Western, Anglophonic, First World Northern Ireland has much more of

a common heritage with Britain and America, than Kosovo, Palestine or Afghanistan:

“Internationally, the Six Counties has shifted from being a key symbol of anti-

imperialist struggle to one of the success stories of the new Anglo-American

imperial orthodoxy” (Rolston & McVeigh, 2007, p. 20). The BBC, during Monica Sims’

years, may have expressed an anti-American sentiment a form of cultural

protectionism, but such “[s]elf-centered localism remains essentially a ‘temptation,’

but in concrete terms it is becoming both less frequent and less possible in today's

26

world” (Bressi, 2003, p. 8). Sesame Tree is a poster child of the peace dividend as

much as Northern Ireland is a poster child for Anglo-American co-operation – “a

shining example of the new imperialism – a foretaste of what was to be achieved in

Iraq and proof that Bush and Blair were not ‘warmongers’ but rather peacemakers”

(Rolston & McVeigh, 2007, p. 20). In 2003, a simultaneously bizarre, ominous and

ironic news report described the use of “culturally offensive” music to “break” Iraqi

prisoners of war (BBC News, 2003). The US military’s Psychological Operations

Company deprived prisoners of sleep by repeatedly playing music such as those

from the band Metallica, music from the children’s television show Barney, and of

course, the Sesame Street theme song. Sesame Tree, being Anglophonic, though

later dubbed into Irish Gaelic, has a differing theme song, written and performed by

local band, Duke Special, helping to (g)localise and distinguish it from the American

original. As Northern Ireland has become increasingly multicultural, more attractive

to migrant workers due to the peace dividend, racism has become much more of a

focus in recent times. One of the major discourses of the following chapter is

Sesame Tree in the context of sectarianism and racism, and the Sesame Workshop

model of dealing with learning and complex emotions, and promoting mutual

respect.

27

3. The ‘Glocal’ Processes of the Sesame Tree Project

“The raison d’être of Northern Ireland was sectarianism” (McVeigh, 2001, p. 631).

Sectarianism has been so long established and so ingrained; it might even be called

a tradition. “In few places elsewhere in the world, I think, is a historical event three

hundred years before”, wrote Keith Kyle in 1996, “kept perpetually in the people’s

eye as having only happened yesterday in the way that the Battle of the Boyne is for

Unionists a triumphalist occasion” (p. 107). Despite the historic Good Friday

Agreement of 1998, and Northern Ireland becoming the poster child for peace (cf.

chapter 2, p. 26), “[s]ectarianism continues to profoundly structure where people

are born, where they go to school, where they live, where they work, where they

socialise, what sports teams they support and where they are buried” (Rolston &

McVeigh, 2007, p. 16). The term ‘sectarian’ has been “so routinely used by

politicians and the media” (McVeigh, 2001, p. 622), as a general adjective, and as a

prefix to words like ‘violence’, ‘act’, ‘killing’, ‘rioting’ and so on, it became the

“elephant in the living room” (Rolston & McVeigh, 2007, p. 16); impossible to deny,

difficult to talk about, and rarely defined. Rolston, after McVeigh, posits that “it is

necessary to attempt to overcome the under-theorisation of sectarianism by naming

it as what it in fact is, a form of racism” (ibid. p. 3).

As well as being an exploration of Sesame Tree’s didacticism and

methodology, this chapter is as much about what is not there as what is. Literature,

music, the visual arts, editing, are as much about the unoccupied spaces, as that

which occupies it, the silence and the sound, the things left in and the things cut

out, what is visible and what is invisible. Aspects of discourses in imperialism and

commercial hegemony, examined in the previous chapters, are analogous to that of

sectarianism and racism, in how each can become so pervasive that, for all intents

and purposes, they become the norm; “the default position, something so universal

and so unquestioned that it has become effectively invisible”, to reprise Buckingham

(2007, p. 48). Stuart Hall explains the insidiousness of ‘the default position’, and

28

the difficulties faced by those represented “only by their eloquent absence… or

refracted through the glance or gaze of others”:

If you are white, male, a businessman or a politician or a professional or a celebrity, your

chances of getting represented will be very high. If you are black, or a woman without social

status, or poor or working class or gay or powerless because you are marginal, you will

always have to fight to get heard or seen. This does not mean that no one from the latter

groups will ever find their way into the media. But it does mean that the structure of access to

the media is systematically skewed in relation to certain social categories. (1988, p. 9)

“Culture and race are not the same thing” but they are “intimately intertwined” (Lull,

1996, p. 67). This chapter is also about the ‘glocalisation’ process as applied to the

Sesame Tree project, and its efforts to open up a transnational worldview

encouraging inclusivity, tolerance and multiculturalism. Northern Ireland must look

outward if it is to have greater self-determination, to turn away from the “self-

centered localism” (2003, p. 7), that Bressi warned of, and sever its ‘umbilical’, state

and economic dependency on the rest of the United Kingdom (cf. chapter 1. p. 23-

24). To do this, the Sesame Tree series draws upon forty years of pedagogical

heritage of Sesame Street, which was designed to be inclusive and multicultural

from its inception.

Recently, it appears that, media coverage of the Troubles has been usurped

by reports of racial abuse. Racism in Northern Ireland has become of greater focus

since the Good Friday Agreement, with ominous headlines such as “Northern Ireland,

which is 99% white, is fast becoming the race-hate capital of Europe” (Chrisafis,

2004). In June 2009, over one hundred Romanian Gypsies were intimidated and

ousted from Belfast, and eventually flown home at the expense of the government:

“Over the past decade of peace and prosperity in Belfast, several thousand Asian,

African and Eastern European immigrants have settled in the roughest Protestant

districts of the city, where rents are lowest and empty properties plentiful”

(Pogatchnik, 2009). The peace process has “revealed a new raw nerve”, recession

augmented xenophobia of economic migrants, “workers mainly from Poland,

29

Lithuania and Romania” (Gergely, 2009).

Racism in its most basic terms may be defined as “a predisposition to

respond in an unfavourable manner to members of a racial group,” and according to

Aboud and Doyle, racial “prejudice appears to be high in children as young as 5

years of age" (2000, pp. 257-258). Concurrently, a recent University of Ulster study,

taking a sample of children in Northern Ireland, found that “children as young as

three can hold strong, prejudiced views" (University of Ulster, 2002). Paul Connolly’s

report for Barnardo’s and the Save the Children Fund also contained some

interesting comments. A six-year-old girl stated, ‘A Protestant is a bad person…

because they want to kill all Catholics’. A four-year-old girl stated, ‘Catholics are the

same as masked men, they smash windows’. An older, fourteen-year-old boy asserts,

‘Gypsies - they're all tramps, whores’, and a twelve-year-old boy stated, ‘If you sit on

a Chinese [person’s] wall they come out with knives… they sit and stare at you and

you’re waiting for them to turn on you”. According to the report, “1 in 3 NI

schoolchildren face sectarian threats, 2 in 3 ethnic minority children experience

racism” (ibid.). The need for projects promoting tolerance, such as Sesame Tree,

could scarcely be more salient and timely. Over four decades ago, aside from

literacy and pro-learning values, the second predominant function of the original

Sesame Street project was to promote racial inclusivity and mutual respect. As Joan

Ganz Cooney recalled, it did so by providing minority representation, allowing

human protagonists to interact with Muppets in a ‘real world’ setting:

We decided that the show would be completely integrated in terms of races and eventually in

terms of disabilities, and we set it in an urban street. Children's shows were always placed in

‘magic rooms’ or in suburbs, or somewhere not urban, so this was quite shocking.

(Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006)

Much of Sesame Tree takes place within the hollow of a ‘question tree’, where

questions are brought and eventually answered, and where the series takes its

name. The attractive and colourful mise-en-scène is somewhat more fantastical, and

even more stylised than the urban derived settings of the original US, Sesame Street

30

series. Financial Times correspondent, Sarah Richards suggests, “it's easier to have

children hanging around a tree than decide if the street is in a Catholic or Protestant

neighbourhood” (2008).

Nevertheless, Muppets provide the framework to encourage children’s

curiosity of others and the world around them. One of two main protagonists, Potto,

is an agoraphobic, purple, monster inventor Muppet, who is never seen outside the

confines of the Sesame Tree (bar in the title sequence). He explores the world

vicariously, with help from Hilda, the inquisitive Irish hare Muppet. Through the use

of the ‘Pottoscope’, a sort of binocular video system allowing Potto to see Hilda’s

adventures, we get to see what children are up to from around Northern Ireland.

The narrative device allows children to see other local children from differing

backgrounds, utilising elementary drama to provide “paths to the understanding of

personal experience”, counterbalancing the predominant, global tendency to solely

employ non-human characters14 and fiction that “only digs deeper channels to

fantasy” (Kline, 1993, p. 314). However, there are only two episodes out of twenty in

which the Sesame Tree Muppets actually interact with human characters – the

penultimate episode and series finale. Nevertheless, there are advantages to being

non-human and racially indistinct, as seen with Takalani Sesame, and Kami (cf.

chapter 1. p. 4). Having a Muppet as a surrogate to explore difficult social questions

can be an advantage, as I will expand upon later. For the moment, the lack of

human and Muppet character interaction is not a didactic failure, but a mainly

logistical constraint, where budget and time were largely to factor. To once more

reprise Liebert and Sprafkin, “[u]nderstanding the way in which television is

operated, financed, and controlled as a business is essential to understanding the

medium and its messages” (1988, p. 21). And as a general rule, a project is never

perfect, never finished; it only runs out of time and money.

As is common with many television serials, each episode of Sesame Tree

follows a common, narrative framework, which helps audiences familiarise with the

14 cf. chapter 1, pp. 3-4

31

format of the programme. It is also a basic television, programme-making practice,

employing Fordian techniques for economy of scale, and utilising conveyor-belt-like

processes for efficiency, where each crewmember specialises and is responsible for

a specific area. To provide a brief guide, each fifteen-minute, ‘magazine style’

episode typically abides by the following sequence of events and structure: The title

sequence featuring specially composed music by Duke Special with lyrics by Ian

McDonald (writer and head of development for the show), transitions to an interior

scene of the Sesame Tree. Lead Muppets, Potto and Hilda banter briefly with a

scenario that follows particular educational goals, which become the narrative

themes that carry throughout the rest of the show segments. The ‘Big Whizzy

Machine’ (BWM), a kind of communications system, sounds its alarm, interrupting

Potto and Hilda’s banter. Alerted, the two Muppets operate the machine, and a child,

or sometimes a group of kids, asks a question that follows the educational theme of

the programme via the BWM screen. The Muppets ponder before going to consult

the resident Bookworm Muppets, whom provide information on where they can find

an answer to the question. Hilda consults the Weatherberries, berry-like Muppets

that also inhabit the Sesame Tree, on what the weather will be like on location. The

Weatherberries sing, but sometimes just give their answer, dependant on whether

the particular episode duration is running too long, in which case, the songs are

where most time can be cut without removing elements of script and dialogue.

Hilda exits to go to the location and the Weatherberries tell a joke. Potto, who is

beside his computer, reacts to their joke, and then consults ‘Monster Earth’, which

is an Internet-like application that allows us to see other films from around the

world, from a huge library of Sesame Workshop international co-production, ‘live

action films’ (International LAFs – although some are animation-based films, despite

the nomenclature). Potto then checks ‘Monster Babble’, to see what other Muppets

are up to, which allows us to tap into the library of sketches, or ‘limbo’ pieces, from

the original Sesame Street series, helping to further associate, and endorse the

Sesame Street brand. Potto then receives a phone call from Hilda indicating that she

has arrived at the location. He then uses the ‘Pottoscope’ to see Hilda introduce the

32

‘on location’ report or local ‘live action film’ (LAF). After the local LAF, we return to

Potto in the Sesame Tree, Hilda shortly returns, having found the answer. They

enter the answer into the ‘Big Whizzy Machine’ or BWM. The children, who asked the

question at the beginning of the show, thank the Sesame Tree through the BWM for

providing the answer, and the Muppets do a short recap before signing off. Finally,

the credits roll.

The magazine style structure of the programme, in short, is a mise-en-abîme

or ‘framing device’ that allows each Sesame Street co-production to cross-pollinate

media messages that are culturally distinct, but commonly themed, using each co-

production’s specific local Muppets to provide a framework for VT (video tape)

inserts. In the case of the Northern Ireland Sesame Tree co-production, Potto and

Hilda are our main Muppet presenters, performing the role of neutral, trustworthy

and entertaining guides to stories around and about Northern Ireland, and the

world. To recapitulate Timothy Havens, they are protagonists that “overcome racial

and ethnic differences” (2007; cf. chapter 1. p. 3), ‘glocalised’ non-human

characters, who have no religion or race bar that of being Muppet-kind, who

nonetheless come from Northern Ireland. They speak with Northern Irish regional

accents, use local dialect words like “beezer” instead of ‘great’ or ‘cool’, and

“gutties” in place of ‘trainers’ or ’sneakers’, and as Hilda is always leaving the

Sesame Tree to investigate different places around the country, then deductively,

the Sesame Tree must be a real place and a real tree, standing tall somewhere in

Northern Ireland, just like it does in the title sequence.

The glocalisation process takes advantage of local expertise to adapt media

messages for local reception, adopting cultural nuances in mise-en-scène, language

and expression. Sesame Workshop business development manager, and Bangladesh

co-production producer, Sean Love, summarises the Sesame process of local

adaptation, which involves “identifying what the needs are, and then coming up

with some sort of curriculum that addresses those needs, and then bringing

together researchers and creative people to produce a show… we rely very heavily

on local people” (Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). The local ‘live action films’

33

are particularly culturally sensitive, as they are an opportunity for each co-

production to express their unique identities. Ronan McCloskey recalls the process

from a local perspective, as Sesame Tree LAF director:

Once we had settled on the theme or goal of each film, it didn’t take that much further time to

get suitable contributors and locations. This was largely because Laura [Mailey]15 and myself

have a lot of experience making programmes like Children in Need for the BBC, which had

brought us into contact with a lot of schools and groups around Northern Ireland. I think

being local meant that we more or less knew instinctively how and where to get suitable

contributors. For instance I live close to Botanic Primary School and was aware that they

have a very diverse student body. (2009)

Glenda Walsh, an educational consultant with expertise in early childhood education,

care and policy (cf. Walsh, 2007), oversaw the development of the shows goals, to

ensure they were “in line with the government's new educational curriculum, which

includes a component on ‘mutual understanding’” (Richards, 2008). Researchers

from the Queen’s University Centre for Effective Education were also involved in

consultation. Having been present at Sesame Workshop presentations, meetings

and discussions, Ronan McCloskey, as LAF director was “conscious of the Sesame

message throughout the filming and editing” (2009). The ‘Sesame model’ of

pedagogical consultation provided the objectives of each LAF, “and without the

goals the films would have been purposeless”, nevertheless McCloskey

diplomatically recalls, “I think there was a tension between myself and the

educationalists at the outset as I didn’t want people interfering with my films and

they I guess wanted to have their input”. One of the best assets of an editor is

dispassionate objectivity, providing a second set of eyes, and a second chance at

directing without the pressures on location: “Once we got into editing that all

evaporated” (ibid.).

Nevertheless, the tension between education (i.e. the eagerness for moral

didacticism) and the business of making television is something that merits further

15 Sesame Tree, local LAF associate producer

34

discourse. To paraphrase Máire Messenger Davies, there is a tendency to forget,

that children have the need to be entertained as well as to be educated (1989, p.

135; cf. chapter 1. p. 11). Concurrently, David Buckingham et al. highlight, “very few

critics seem prepared to stand up for children’s right to just ‘have a laugh’ –

although, it should be noted, programme-makers certainly have” (2000, p. 17):

Television is a “serious business of entertaining” (Morrow, 2006, p. 21). Decades of

Sesame Workshop research has demonstrated, being educational and being

entertaining are not mutually exclusive. Even the simplest television narratives have

educational value, as interpreting audiovisual grammar of television is not

something we are born with. At the very least, ‘children must have an ability to

understand the underlying logic of events’ (Davies 1989, p.23), and that is a skill

that must be learned. Sesame Tree’s production company, Sixteen South’s

understanding of the ‘Sesame model’ was not to “push messages”, in the words of

executive producer Colin Williams, but to show “the broadest range of life kids have

here” (Richards, 2008). In other words, Sesame Tree was to be inherently but tacitly

multicultural, as was the consensus with those experienced in making programmes.

In one case, some xxxxxxxxxxxx were eager to push didactic messages by making

LAF contributors (the on-screen talent) more apparently xxxxxx I will refrain from

citing examples, but instead defer to the words of Pat Loughrey, former controller

of BBC Northern Ireland, who warned that, a “media shorthand of easy symbols can

be damaging and dangerous” (1996, p. 71). Citing William Crain’s 2003 book,

‘Reclaiming Childhood’, Gail Ringel suggests, “‘[i]nstead of thinking about our own

goals, we should consider the children’s interests and needs’” (2005, p. 6),

… children aged 4–6 are just beginning to develop their own ethnic identity and they have an

interest in how and why people do things. They are able to elaborate on group differences

and, curiously enough, they believe they can change their ethnic identity – sometimes by

changing their clothes. They begin to self identify as a group member, and they have clear

feelings towards different groups. (ibid.)

Ringel is not critical of didacticism per se, but simply wary of children’s capacity for

35

abstract understanding at such early stages in their lives. Research and pre-

production is an indispensible and vital part of the filmmaking process, but it is

important to remain grounded within the limits of achievable goals and practice.

As aforementioned, television is a collaborative process, with many creative

people assigned to specific tasks and specialisms. Experienced personnel

understand their respective roles and avoid the temptation to over-contribute.

‘Direction by committee’ is highly undesirable, and can hinder processes, cause

friction, and negatively impact efficiency. Clear demarcation helps ensure that

external pressures and distractions do not divert overall objectives and direction,

although external pressures can never really be completely evaded:

We did think about how the adult audiences would receive them, probably more so the

Orange Order and the Irish language films. I wanted to keep them simple and visual and I

think these films worked the best. The emphasis was on the children enjoying them and not

the adults thankfully. (McCloskey, 2009)

For the most part the “Orange Order” films were referred to internally as, the

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with a mild tone of incredulity, as no one was under any

illusions that the LAF would not be seen as anything but an xxxxxxxxxxxx

Nevertheless, reflecting Stephen Kline’s concerns about the predominance of

fantasy and the effacement of reality in children’s media messages, the emphasis of

the LAFs was on allowing “children [to] see other youngsters in real-life situations”

(Richards, 2008): “The little drummer boy just happens to be at a band parade that

just happens to have a violent history” or certainly ‘just happens to have’

connotations of sectarianism and conflict. “The real story is that the boy learns to

persevere in his drum practice and is rewarded with an ice-cream” (ibid.). From an

American perspective, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and colleagues in xxxxxx

had perhaps forgotten or were more or less oblivious to the ideological implications

of the iconography until reminded by xxxxxxxxxxxx instead, delighted with the

family values of the LAF, as it showed a caring, older brother, helping his younger

brother with his very first uniform, the same uniform that big brother wore when he

36

was little: “It makes me feel good that he wore it”, the little boy ‘says’16 in voice over,

“now I’m going to wear it too!” (Sesame Tree: Episode 5, “Big Hare Day”, 2008)

Much of the filmmaking process involved rendering innocuous, potentially

contentious narratives and iconography. The LAFs “were aimed at pre-school

children and subsequently the images were always going to be the key in terms of

how they were understood by such a young audience” (McCloskey, 2009). In other

words, the films would necessarily contain simple, linear and visual narratives. The

acquisition of those visuals was under severe budget and logistical constraint, with

most LAFs shot “within one short filming period of about eight days” in advance of

the studio segments. The hours that young children are available to be filmed are

also restricted, resulting in ‘run and gun’, or “real in and out filming” in McCloskey’s

words. Another subsequence of such limited filming time would be difficulty in

preplanning. Filming conditions would be very fluid, and thus rigid scripting and

rehearsal would be near impossible. A basic scenario with educational objectives

would have been in mind for each shoot, but much of the voiceover was written

during editing, with a ‘writing to pictures’ process. Editing would be a second

opportunity to construct a story, if the original concept during the shoot was

proving problematic.

In episode eleven, “Turn and Turn About” (Nugent17, 2008), Potto and Hilda

learn about taking turns. The episode features an LAF from xxxxxx Primary, an

integrated school in North Belfast. Eager to help, the children, with the aid of their

teachers, created a playground scenario where a girl of East Asian ethnicity decided

to queue jump instead of waiting her turn to skip rope. All in all, it was a well-filmed

sequence with children very actively involved in acting performances and dialogue,

making piecing together the story very straightforward. However, xxxxxx preview

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subsequently,

the LAF was re-edited into a simplified narrative with voiceover explaining why it is

16 Through necessity, actors performed some (only a few) of the LAF voiceovers. 17 By convention, the producer’s name appears before writers in the reference page. See under Julian-Jones, C.

37

good to take turns and to play together. The act of queue jumping and dialogue

that xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx were cut out, transforming the story

from a misbehaving girl who eventually learns how to play in a group, into a very

ordinary girl’s basic account of all the different type of group games they like to

play at break time, at a harmonious xxxxxx Primary. By ‘ordinary’ I mean a girl that

‘just happens’ to not be Caucasian.

The flagship Sesame Tree episode, in the sense that it is the programme

most publicised as promoting tolerance and understanding, and resolving conflict,

was “The Share Necessities” (Nugent, 2008). The episode was used to “launch the

programme” (Sesame Workshop, 2008) at the Ulster American Society’s ‘Northern

Ireland Film Festival’, and it won the series a CINE ‘Golden Eagle’ in the autumn of

2008 (CINE, 2009). The plotline involves Potto and Hilda splitting up the tree after

an argument, when Potto neglects to share a bunch of grapes. Skirting over the fact

that they were Hilda’s grapes, and Potto ate them without even asking her, the show

provides children with “the opportunity to look at their responsibilities for

themselves and others as well as learning how to respond appropriately in conflict

situations and how to live as a member of the community” (Sesame Workshop,

2009). It features an LAF with the xxxxxx quintuplets from xxxxxx, Conan, Aaron,

Caitlin, Alanna and Aine, sharing their fifth birthday celebrations. “Though we are

similar, we are also very different from each other,” says ‘Conan’ in voice over and

concludes, “it’s good fun sharing things with your brothers and sisters”.

The lesson may be a moot one however, as “[m]ost Protestant and Catholic

children tend to go to separate schools and live in separate neighbourhoods”

(Richards, 2008). Interviewed in Sarah Richards’ Financial Times column, Belfast

Telegraph contributor Eamonn McCann suggests that Sesame Tree “will do some

good but its impact will be minimal... Other factors will continue to create a

separate consciousness” (ibid.), for example, lacklustre support for integrated

schools. The Catholic Church is opposed to integrated education, moreover,

segregation still dominates teacher training: “A Catholic or Protestant can… be

schooled at primary and secondary level, attend training college and get a job as a

38

teacher for life without having left the comfortable company of their own religious

affiliates” (Rolston & McVeigh, 2007, pp. 17-18).

Perhaps as a tacit acknowledgment of the limitations of television as a

teaching medium, Sesame Tree is not described as just a TV series, but “a

multimedia project”, serving “as a valuable resource for children, parents and those

working with children” (Sesame Workshop, 2008). By aligning with the Northern

Ireland curriculum for Primary children, as set out by CEA (the Council for the

Curriculum Examinations and Assessment) (cf. Sesame Workshop, 2007, p. 52) in

tandem with BBC Northern Ireland, the Sesame Workshop tapped into a local

framework of researchers and professionals, including broadcast specialists,

teachers, pedagogists, and multimedia designers. The Sesame Tree series is part of

a ‘media ecology’ (cf. Theall, 2001, pp. 62-63), supported by the BBC NI Schools

website, which incorporates teaching resources, downloadable guides, and ‘Print

and Do’ sheets with cutting out and colouring in activities to name a few. The

website also features an interactive Sesame Tree, where users can access games as

well as a full library of local LAFs and some international LAFs, and featured original

Sesame Street ‘limbo’ sketches, via an animated ‘Big Whizzy Machine’18. BBC NI

outsourced the website creation to Belfast-based company, Front19, with design

headed by company director, Jamie Neely. “BBC NI had a very clear vision for the

games and activities which were to be included in the ‘Sesame Tree’ website”, Front

designer, Eamonn Murphy recalled, “[t]hey had the general idea for what an activity

should be and what the outcome would be and how that relates to a learning

experience for the set age range” (2008). Front worked “in partnership with the

uber-talented [sic] Atto20… to create a complimentary learning resource” (Neely,

2008), one that is advertised at the end of each Sesame Tree episode.

If television is a “window on the world… a vehicle for providing children and

18 http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/sesame/fun_and_games/big_whizzing_machine.shtml 19 http://www.designbyfront.com/ 20 http://blog.helloatto.com/

39

youth with experiences and information otherwise not available to them, their

families or communities” (Graves, 1999, p. 707), with the ability to “break down the

distinctions between here and there, live and mediated, and personal and public”

(Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 308), then that power is likely magnified through the

imagination, ‘suspension of disbelief’ and inexperienced perception of the

preschool child. The multimedia aspect of Sesame Tree potentially places that

magnified power directly into the hands, eyes and ears of the child, granting them

on-demand access to a near instant, interactive ‘window on the world’, like

everyday magic. If they can “believe they can change their ethnic identity” (Ringel,

2005, p. 6), to reiterate Crain, then perhaps that, coupled with the collapsing of the

worldview through the Sesame Tree, would help integrate the “separate

consciousness” (Richards, 2008) that Eamonn McCann mentioned. Of course, access

to a virtual Sesame Tree may allow children to have their very own ‘Big Whizzy

Machine’ to explore, but the site is not quite the undiluted World Wide Web, and

lack of motor skills and inexperience will likely mean the website will be mediated

with the aid of a parent, teacher or guardian as prescribed. Nevertheless, it does

make ‘everyday’ one of the greatest ever, world-changing inventions of our time,

providing children an introduction to the thing that will probably shape their

perceptions of the world to adulthood and throughout the rest of their lives.

40

4. Conclusion

In modern societies, there is a range of institutional provisions for children, all ultimately

originating in what could be seen as a biological evolutionary need for socialization and

protection (survival) and all invoking the responsibility of adult society, whether corporate,

state or personal (parents, community), for the care and moral training of the young.

(Davies, 2004, p. 429; cf. chapter 1. pp. 7-8)

Reflected in our institutions, from the FCC to Ofcom, the BBC to Sesame Workshop,

from the individual nation state to the United Nations, there persists a biologically

motivated, human consensus to do the best for children, to raise them well and

raise them to be ‘good’. But, as James Lull points out, all institutions are social

institutions, and social institutions are precisely “social institutions… in the sense

that they are perpetually constituted by human beings”, and “just as individual lives

and the memberships and agendas of any social group change over time, whatever

ideological structures institutions articulate are social inventions which, like their

authors and interpreters, are not static (Lull, 1996, p. 122). The question of what

media messages are ‘good’ for children is coloured by the “positionality and

situatedness” (Aitkin, 2001, p. 119) of the individual or institution. At the heart of

every discourse throughout this dissertation have been the dilemmas faced by

professionals in contemporary child research, the potential influences of ideological

and political biases and agendas: “Although powerful and well-intended questions,”

writes Stuart Aitkin, “they trace adultist research agendas onto the lives of young

people... we now recognize that our knowledge is perched on precarious and

unsteady ideological foundations” (ibid.). In such a way, media messages, especially

those motivated by moral didacticism often raise questions of cultural imperialism;

of where those messages originated, and for what purpose. Those questions are

further complicated by the fact that the experience of watching television “is highly

mediated not only in terms of technical determinants” but also, “in terms of the

41

complex set of semiotic codes, conventions, formats and production values that it

employs” (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 155). From preproduction, production and

postproduction, through to transmission, reception and interpretation, “[t]here is

clearly massive intervention at all levels” (ibid.). Making television requires

communication and logistics, management and infrastructure working towards a

single endeavour. It demands many skills, the collaboration of many people, and

the keeping and passing of many promises to meet delivery standards and

deadlines, which highlights the commercial nature and influences of the business of

making media messages.

Glocalisation is a two-way process, which further complicates and convolves

discourses of cultural imperialism, in terms of reception and denotation of media

messages. When David Buckingham surveyed a group of six-year-olds about where

Disney films came from, “they opted for France, on the grounds that one of them

had been to Disneyland Paris” (2007, p. 48). And, when first developing Sesame

Street, Joan Ganz Cooney believed “that the Muppets were quintessentially American,

and it turned out that they're the most international characters ever created"

(Goldstein Knowlton & Hawkins, 2006). Glocalisation not only applies to the

adaptation of products to local tastes and requirements, but also in terms of how

they are used. Davies states that “‘racism’ is a function of the interaction between

audience and text, not an inherent which texts either do or do not possess” (1989,

p.106), therefore in terms of polysemy and denotation, moral didacticism and

“education in general” may be in “serious trouble, trying to communicate a body of

knowledge that may be irrelevant to students who may be hostile, fearful, and

unreceptive” (Hesse, 1974, p. 659). The success of those media messages could be

determined by how well they relate socio-politically, as explored in chapter two, or

how congruent those messages are to the target audience, for example in the Uses

and Gratifications model, “racial/ethnic viewers would be expected to want to see

same-race characteristics” (Graves, 1999, p. 713). However, to reprise Giovanni

Bressi, such introverted perspectives may have a limited lifespan, as “[s]elf-centered

localism remains essentially a ‘temptation,’ but in concrete terms it is becoming

42

both less frequent and less possible in today's world” (2003, pp. 7-8; cf. chapter 2,

pp. 25-26). Resistance to Transnationalism, or globalisation may be impossible, but

glocalism may permit some leeway for subversion. Ultimately, culture “can never be

managed by any society’s political-economic power brokers, including its mass

media image makers” (Lull, 1996, p. 114). To a certain extent, we may contribute,

appropriate, adapt and make judgements on the kinds of media messages we make

and receive.

It may be futile to apply the moral judgements of the present to the didactic

standards of the past. Finding universal, altruistic messages is a difficult prospect,

when faced with the vicissitudes of society. That is not to say that discourse in

media messages or exploring ideological aspirations is pointless because the future

will always have different standards, quite the opposite in fact. After all, in the end,

it will be our children who will judge us.

43

Appendix

Below is a pertinent list of UN Articles as examined in ‘Media Globalisation: Consequences for the Rights of Children’ by Cees J. Hamelink (2002, pp. 33-35):

Article 12.1. “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or

her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting

the child…”

Article 13.1. “The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall

include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds,

regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art,

or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

Article 14.1. “States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of

thought…”

Article 16.1. “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with

his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on

his or her honour and reputation.”

Article 16.2. “The child has the right to protection of the law against such

interference or attacks.”

Article 17. “States parties recognize the important function performed by the mass

media and shall ensure that he child has access to information and material

from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed

at the promotion of his of her social, spiritual and moral well-being and

physical and mental health. To this end, States Parties shall:

(a) Encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of

social and cultural benefit to the child and in accordance with the spirit

of article 29;

44

(b) Encourage international co-operation in the production, exchange and

dissemination of such information and material from a diversity of

cultural, national and international sources;

(c) Encourage the production and dissemination of children’s books;

(d) Encourage the mass media to have particular regard to the linguistic needs

of the child who belongs to a minority group or who is indigenous;

(e) Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines for the protection of

the child from information and material injurious to his or her well-being,

bearing in mind the provisions of articles 13 and 18.”

Article 29.1. “States parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed

to:

(a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and

physical abilities to their fullest potential;

(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,

and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;

(c) The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural

identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in

which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate

and for civilizations from his or her own;

(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the

spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and

friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and

persons of indigenous groups.”

45

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