Nick Wilson

 

Offering the best shows, from animated series featuring lovable characters in endearing story lines to documentaries about children in real-life situations, the Milkshake! block on Five has won the hearts of preschoolers across the U.K. Nick Wilson, the director of children’s programming at Five, talks about the content and the target audience he loves so much.

 

TV KIDS: What does Milkshake! aim to offer young viewers?

WILSON: I suppose the big word I always use is “stories.” Milkshake! is a breakfast-time block from 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. every morning. What we offer is strong in storytelling and it’s digestible in its size. Most of our programs are somewhere between five minutes and a quarter of an hour long. We always understand that our audience is moving around a lot in the morning. What we try to do is offer the best portfolio of stories of any broadcaster in the U.K.

 

TV KIDS: The competitive landscape in the British children’s market is intense. What has given you a competitive edge over many of the other channels serving the same age group?

WILSON: I think there are three things. The first one is the time slot that we’ve got. We really only have the BBC to compete with at that time in the morning. When Milkshake! launched, we were on our own in preschool programming at breakfast time, so we got a head start on CBeebies and everyone else. And we’ve managed to maintain that kind of advantage.

The second thing is, the tone of our presentation is very distinctive. It’s non-patronizing. It’s very straightforward and based around an extremely talented set of presenters. We always have live continuity, which means we can respond to our viewers’ needs, we can run competitions, we can read their e-mails. We can do birthday requests as well as promote and host our programs.

And the final thing, and probably the most important, is that we would claim to have far and away the strongest lineup of preschool programs in the U.K.

 

TV KIDS: Do acquisitions play an important role in your schedule?

WILSON: Yes, they do. Our two main new series this year have both been acquisitions. One is Chiro, from Korea, and the other one is The WotWots!, from Pukeko Pictures (made at Weta Workshop) and the ABC in Australia.

 

TV KIDS: And when acquiring programs, do you look for good strong stories that are appropriate for your age group?

WILSON: Yes, indeed. We look for programs that will reach the benchmark that has been set by our top five or six programs. When you look at what we have in our portfolio, from Peppa Pig through to Mr. Men, with Little Princess, Fifi and the Flowertots and Noddy, there is a really strong quality hurdle that programs have to leap before we will consider them as either acquisitions or as co-productions.

 

TV KIDS: Tell me about the website. How does that support the linear channel?

WILSON: Essentially the website is built around our Milkshake! content, because we do produce quite a lot in-house now, along with pages relating to our leading characters. Because our audience is preschool, there is a limit to how much they use a site. So everything is based on point and click. You don’t have to be literate to work your way around our website. If a parent puts a child on our website and leaves them to point and click, something interesting will happen. But being a broadcaster and television-based, we are very strong on video content.

 

TV KIDS: What has been the reaction of parents and caregivers to the site?

WILSON: Very enthusiastic. It’s very popular. It’s the most popular part of Five’s overall website. We are hoping to do a major revamp of it later this year, which will have more to do with the design than the content—we find the content works very well. We’ve made three series so far for both online and linear broadcast: Milkshake! Music Box, which is about nursery rhymes; Milkshake! Bop Box, which was “get up and dance”; and Milkshake! Animal Alphabet, which, as you can guess, is about animals relating to the alphabet. All are made as short video content, between one and three minutes in length.

 

TV KIDS: The U.K.’s children’s market has been through quite a bit of turmoil. What is your assessment of it?

WILSON: We’ve all been hit by the economic downturn, particularly advertiser-funded broadcasters. Ad revenues, as you are aware, are down across the board, and that includes ad revenues around children’s programs. Milkshake! is still, as a block within the Five schedule, profitable, and that secures its future for the short and medium term. We’ve had to cut our investment budget this year and we’ll be cutting it next year, but I have every reason to be optimistic that it will be back up to previous levels by 2011. This is probably an ambition that other broadcasters have as well, but I think we would have our heads in the sand if we pretended everything was absolutely perfect and rosy in the world, because it isn’t at the moment, but it is a question of fastening your seat belts, hanging on and coming out the other side.

 

TV KIDS: What reputation does Milkshake! have within the independent production community in the U.K.? You must be quite popular because you still commission programs!

WILSON: I think we are quite popular for that very reason. We have continued to commission and we’ve actually worked very hard this year, particularly with our live-action producers, to keep the smaller companies afloat. We’ve done a couple of commissions where, as much as we needed the programs, we actually did them in preference perhaps to more international co-productions, to keep some of our smaller, very loyal independents afloat in a difficult time. I think that has given a warm glow to us in certain sectors of the independent production community. Also we have tried very hard with our regular suppliers, like Chapman Entertainment and Chorion, to keep something going in their direction, as well.

 

TV KIDS: How much of what you commission is done as co-productions?

WILSON: In terms of animation, nearly all of it. We’ll do one or two lower-cost animations that we fully fund, but most of our animation production is co-produced, simply because to get the kind of quality that our audience has become used to, we need to share the burden of the investment.

 

TV KIDS: What are a few upcoming shows that you are excited about?

WILSON: We’ve got a new series from Calon TV called Igam Ogam, which is a co-production with S4C. It is a model animation comedy about a young cave girl called Igam Ogam. We have a new 2-D animation called Castle Farm, which will come up next year as well, and is based on designs by a Northern Irish artist called Corrina Askin. It’s being made by Impossible TV and it’s not hugely expensive, so we are fully funding it.

And we’ve got some live action coming into the schedule this autumn. It’s currently in post-production. It’s an observational documentary series called Family, which follows five different preschoolers and their families—it’s quite a long series, 50×7 minutes. We have previously produced documentary series for preschoolers: Big School, about starting school, Play!, an observational doc on children in unstructured play, and that left us with Family to complete the picture.

 

TV KIDS: You don’t even collect a license fee and you offer quite a bit of public-service programming.

WILSON: The thing about preschoolers is they are like a virgin audience, and it’s really important whether you are a commercial broadcaster or a public-service broadcaster that you give them a rich schedule that is not all animation. It becomes a habit; children like to watch other children and they like stories, and if you can do real documentary stories about other children, they actually rate very well.

 

TV KIDS: And they are little sponges at that age, aren’t they?

WILSON: They are little sponges. The response we got to the series Big School was so heartwarming. Parents said, We’re really pleased you did this. Our children are no longer frightened to go to school, because they’ve seen what it is like and they thought it looked fun.

 

TV KIDS: What kind of feedback do you get from the little ones?