Channel 5’s Sarah Muller

Since its launch in 1997, British free-to-air broadcaster Channel 5 has made children’s programming a priority with its Milkshake! block. Combining high-energy presenters, beloved originals such as Peppa Pig and select acquisitions, Milkshake! has endeared itself to preschoolers and parents alike. As the head of children’s at Channel 5, Sarah Muller is tasked with continuing Milkshake!’s winning streak while navigating the constantly evolving kids’ media landscape. Since joining Channel 5 last year following a long career at CBBC, Muller has led a rebrand and refresh of Milkshake!, stepped up its digital presence and is collaborating with her colleagues at fellow Viacom-owned outfit Nickelodeon. She tells TV Kids about her programming remit and her focus on engaging with audiences on multiple platforms.

TV KIDS: What’s the overall programming strategy you’ve put into place over the past year at Channel 5?
MULLER: It’s been about taking a holistic view of what Milkshake! is and the needs of a modern audience, and getting everybody here and out in the wider world to think of it as a brand rather than a block on a linear channel. The programming has fallen in naturally behind that. We’re super lucky because we already have an enviable slate of great content to work with, titles like Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom and Peppa Pig. Moving forward, I’m looking at how I can complement that. So largely the strategy is around contemporary, fresh content that will delight and surprise the audience, but that also will work across a number of platforms.

TV KIDS: How has the transition been for you from public-service broadcasting to commercial?
MULLER: It’s been easier than I might have expected. In the end it’s all about great programming, and that’s what drives all of us. But what is interesting is that I do now have the flexibility to work with partners and producers in a slightly more commercially realistic way, which obviously the BBC is not free to do. So that is very exciting. But generally speaking, it’s all about the content for me, always was, always will be.

TV KIDS: Being part of the Viacom family, how are you collaborating with your colleagues at Nickelodeon?
MULLER: I’m very lucky, I sometimes feel like a gem within a crown! Nick and Channel 5 have always worked very successfully together. It’s a long and viable relationship dating right back to the first days of Peppa Pig. We’ve always sat naturally together. I get all the support of being part of Viacom. And there is the opportunity to develop synergies and work together [with Nickelodeon] on titles that might be of interest and to share and swap and inform. It’s a fabulous experience; I do feel blessed.

TV KIDS: The U.K. has so many children’s services, linear and digital. What makes Channel 5’s offerings distinctive in that crowded environment?
MULLER: Well, I would like to say we’re probably in a crowded environment of one because we are the only permanent children’s block with its own identity that sits on a national channel on a daily basis. So we’re already in a different place. We forget, as media professionals, that not everybody has access to absolutely everything. The fact that you can reach children in all households, even if they are with carers or grandparents who might not have all the bells and whistles of access to all channels, is really important; I’m quite proud of that. That’s number one. And then the presenters, real people who give a personality to the content. It turns out that this is a brilliant way of engaging the audience. And because they are unique, it makes us feel unique. Only we and CBeebies are working in this way in the U.K. We’re offering our young audience a relationship, a friendship as it were, because there’s a very definite dialogue between the audience and the presenters in terms of sending in paintings, competitions, birthday cards, shout-outs, all of those kinds of things. It adds to the feeling that Milkshake! is in your front room with you and is part of your family. We’ve also got a uniquely British feel that not everyone else has the luxury of. And we’re careful now to make sure we’re everywhere children are.

TV KIDS: Tell us about the brand refresh this summer.
MULLER: We’re all incredibly proud of it. Milkshake! had looked the same for the best part of 20 years. We worked with some very talented designers. Here’s another left-field way that we are working with our friends at Nickelodeon. One of their in-house designers has worked with my team to deliver something truly magical that resonates with children and has future-proofed us for the coming years. We have a whole suite of assets now that take us across all of the places we have the ambition to be. [The refresh reflects] what is special at Milkshake!—the craft, the joining in, the feeling of sending your painting in and then seeing it on-screen. It has resonated with everybody. It has a lovely hand-drawn feel to it. It put children at the center, when in the past that was not necessarily the case—it was probably a ’90s approach, with our presenters dancing at the front. We’ve circled our wagons around our young audience. We’re really happy with how it’s gone. I’ve done all sorts of things where you refresh or you bring classics back, and the key is for no one to notice you’ve done it. No one has noticed we’ve done it! It couldn’t be more different, but no one has written in to complain about any aspect of it. That to me is more than 1,000 letters saying, you’ve done well. It’s the half a million letters we haven’t had from our audience complaining that we changed everything they loved! Isn’t that odd? It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s how you know, everyone has carried on loving it. We’re up year-on-year and month-on-month, quite emphatically so.

TV KIDS: You mentioned Peppa Pig and Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom. What other shows are driving viewing at present?
MULLER: One of our top shows at the moment is Noddy Toyland Detective. There have been lots of iterations of Noddy—it’s a classic property in the U.K., possibly quite old fashioned, but the team at Universal and DreamWorks Animation have worked hard to turn out something modern and vibrant. The audience is responding well to that; it’s number one on most weeks. We’ve introduced Floogals, which is made in the U.K., and it’s doing very well. And then we have Digby Dragon, which is a very British show and a great example of how Nickelodeon and Channel 5 work together.

TV KIDS: What are some of the new commissions you have in the pipeline?
MULLER: We are commissioning further series of favorites like Noddy and Floogals. We have a character called Milkshake! Monkey, who is very, very popular with children. He is puppeteered by Helena Smee, who is just great. We’ve been looking for a while at how we might make more of Monkey. He features heavily in our short-form, but we’re aiming to make a live-action preschool comedy with him. We have a couple of other things that will be announced soon. And then it’s short-form. Short-form works in a number of ways for us. It helps us to fill the schedule in an engaging way, and it’s also now getting a second life on the website or on YouTube. Short-form for us is largely presenter-led. It’s them sharing their passions, it’s cookery inserts, how-to dances, songs—they’re a very musical, talented bunch. Things like that will absolutely form the backbone of the more exciting, bigger commissions that we’ll be making in a couple of months.

TV KIDS: You said the channel has a very British feel. Is there room for foreign acquisitions on the schedule as well?
MULLER: There are some very well-known international titles that we take via Nickelodeon. And then when we were looking at how to refresh the schedule and bring some new and exciting titles to the audience, quickly—you know how long it takes to get something on-screen for commissions—we picked up a handful of shows, like Simon from GO-N International in France. We dropped him into the schedule to complement what else we were doing and it’s worked well from the get-go. I’m a big fan of a judicious acquisition. There’s some great content out there.

TV KIDS: At MIPJunior last year you talked about how kids’ producers were still grappling with nonlinear storytelling and engagement. How is Milkshake! approaching the issue of digital content?
MULLER: You know how strongly I felt about it! Some of that was based on the great research I’d seen, and understanding where young audiences were. We know that kids are early adopters. In the children’s sector, like it or not, we’ve got to get on and embrace some of those changes. Children are everywhere they can be and they demand and expect you to be there, and if you’re not they’ll move on to someone else. So I like to call the transmission block the shop front of Selfridges—you see lots of lovely things in the window, and they encourage you to come in and experience more of what’s on offer in the store. We’re looking for a second life for existing content, new complementary content and exclusive content for YouTube and the website. We’re also looking very carefully at what a curated social-media campaign looks like. Although small children aren’t on social media, their parents are. When you have very small children, if they love something you love it too and you want to be part of it and share it with other families and carers who think the same. So we’ve started to do more with our presenters and our content characters across Facebook and Instagram. It’s thinking about how all of those elements sit together. You’ve got to recalibrate your brain a little bit; everybody has to. Other­wise, these other equally important components will be treated as afterthoughts, and you cannot do that. It’s all got to be part of one constantly evolving, growing, supportive whole.

TV KIDS: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the kids’ content sector in the U.K. at present?
MULLER: The kids’ content production community in the U.K. is incredible, particularly at preschool. They’ve been responsible for some of the most abiding, most successful, most loved hits. So I’m in a great place. There’s no shortage of ideas and talent. The industry has always been creative in its approach to funding and finding ways of closing the gap on investment. That has not changed. It’s about looking at what the revenue streams are for the emerging platforms. And working out how to measure that success because we don’t have those metrics in place quite as well yet. This is not the first or last time that the children’s industry will be on the frontier of something special and new. I have complete confidence in them to tackle it, as they did when video, SVOD—all of the different things that were going to kill us all forever—first came on the scene. All they do is give you other options and make you stronger. So I’m broadly optimistic.