Reality’s children: young people and factual entertainment television

Abstract

This article addresses a deficit in television scholarship through its focus on children’s engagements with contemporary factual entertainment television. The article seeks to indicate the contemporary diversity of children’s engagements with factual television, to examine public service broadcasters’ increasing use of children’s performative labour in non-drama productions and to point the way for further research. The article begins with a survey of existing literature on children, television and factual entertainment in order to identify the lack of attention paid to this issue and these questions. In the next section, we draw on interviews conducted with television producers to frame our discussion of the ways in which analysis of factual entertainment featuring made for children can both instantiate and shed light on broader changes in television production, and in particular, public service broadcasting. The final section of the article analyses the policy context for children’s engagements with factual entertainment television.