BBC Children’s Sarah Muller

The BBC operates the most-watched kids’ services in the U.K., but like pubcasters everywhere, faces its fair share of challenges. Patricia Hidalgo, the director of BBC Children’s and Education, set out her vision to a group of reporters earlier this year, noting, “We knew we had to evolve, and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic has expedited that further. We needed to better understand what our audiences wanted and how they consumed our content and evolve our commissioning decisions.” In that light, Hidalgo unveiled a restructure of her content teams, dividing them by age rather than channel brand and combining commissions and acquisitions. To oversee content for the 7-plus set, BBC Children’s enlisted respected kids’ industry veteran Sarah Muller, who had returned to the pubcaster in 2019 after roles at Milkshake! and the POP services in the U.K. Muller tells TV Kids about her content approach.

***Image***TV KIDS: Tell us about the crucial role kids’ programming plays on the BBC.
MULLER: In children’s, we’re working for kids aged 0 to 12. For that demographic, 80 percent of the U.K.’s children spend at least three-quarters of their time with us at some stage in the week. BBC Children’s is a microcosm, in a way, of the whole of the rest of the BBC. We provide a full service that goes from daily live news through live-action drama, factual, comedy and entertainment. We try to supply something for everybody. It was a difficult year last year. We found ourselves doing some different things than what we might normally do. We’ve been in a really good position to meet the challenges thrown at us in a unique set of circumstances. We’ve demonstrated our importance to our communities and societies in the last year in a way that we haven’t been offered before.

TV KIDS: Are there content directives you must take into consideration?
MULLER: We’re focused on our audience and delivering public-service value to them. It’s making sure we remain focused on a really good sweep of different types of content, from factual through to drama. It’s also about the type of work we do and where we do it. We’re always very keen to make sure our production bases and our commissioning bases are situated around all of the U.K., not just in the media-centric areas. So, across the regions, up into the north into Manchester and Newcastle, but also in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. That’s how we work our quota system.

TV KIDS: What kinds of acquisitions are you eyeing?
MULLER: iPlayer has very much become the focus of our activity. So alongside our public-service commissioning, we will be looking for acquisitions for iPlayer. We have a wide sweep of successful live-action pieces across all the genres. It’s 6 to 9, 2D, character-driven comedy animations that we’ve struggled to find off the shelf. I have a personal wish to find some anime suitable for our young audience, and that means complex storytelling with an arc, something that demands attention and engagement in a different way but doesn’t have tons of violence and sexual stereotyping. We’re always looking for films. Apart from that, we’re looking for the lovely, holistic, unexpected thing that we haven’t made ourselves, we probably wouldn’t make ourselves, but that tells a really great story, shows a different way of life, somewhere else in the world that isn’t in the modern, contemporary U.K. kids’ experience. We’re always looking to be surprised by the unexpected.

TV KIDS: Tell us about the recent restructure based on age and combining the commissioning and acquisitions teams.
MULLER: We’re trying to make sure that we reflect the audience and their needs in a more proactive way. It’s become clear that, for us, channels were potentially quite limiting in terms of how we reach different children. If you weren’t careful, you would end up picking the same narrow-gauge group of content over and over again. It’s just proved easier to break down how we approach finding world-class content for our audience across the whole 0 to 12 age group if we start to think about the individual needs of a smaller group of children. Within the 0 to 6 commissioning band, you’ve got 0 to 3 and 4 to 6. Within my group, 7 to 12, you’ve got 7 to 9 and 8 to 12. That makes it much easier to micro-identify needs in a way we might not have done before. That picks up on the trend for self-scheduling, for selecting what you want to watch. It also allows us to be realistic about where we’re putting things, how we’re telling different parts of the audience about what we’re doing. It also makes us able to be honest with ourselves about the need for business structure and brands within what we’re doing, even within public service. We do have to make sure we’re still entertaining and engaging kids within public service. There’s no point in making terribly worthy shows that nobody wants to watch. We’re hoping this will help us strategize around where the great things we’re already doing will need to land and how to land them. It’s about working more closely with audiences. It’s about getting ourselves battle-ready, future-proof, making sure the BBC—which is 100 years old soon—is going to be able to meet the challenges of the next 100 years.

TV KIDS: Tell us more about addressing diversity and inclusivity in your programming remit.
MULLER: Diversity is just a terribly straightforward and very important thing that we all need to think about in different ways. We have worked hard to get on-screen representation front and center. We’ve done well. What we’ve identified [that needs work] is behind the camera and at the managerial level. What writers, creators, directors are we bringing in? How can we reflect their stories? We’ll all be the beneficiaries of widening our net beyond the narrow pool of people we tend to draw from. For the BBC, diversity isn’t just about ethnicity. It’s also gender, ability, sexual identity and socioeconomic. A very narrow group of people with a very narrow life experience end up creating a lot of our content, so the jokes are the same and the stories are the same and the characters are the same. We as an entire organization are committed to building on that diversity, going as far as to embed it into our contracts now, and we have a series of targets that are enshrined in our agreements. We’re definitely going to make it work. It’s very important, and this is the time we have to get it right.

TV KIDS: How do you see the competitive landscape now since the emergence of global SVOD and AVOD services catering to kids?

MULLER: They have a global approach, a global outlook. For me, that means that in their attempt to reach everybody, with exceptions, they might end up reaching nobody. When you’re trying to think on that scale, sometimes you miss things—the emotional beats, the curiosity. We’ve all got something that our audience is looking for. I think that’s harder to do if you’re trying to think very, very big off the page, rather than, “This is just the right thing to do off the page.” I still think they struggle enormously with discoverability. Yes, they’ve got lots of choice, but I struggle to find things I want to watch, to discover something new, without opinion pieces that I’ve read online that might direct me to something. It’s even harder for kids. It’s really hard to find the brands that are for you. The thing that [public broadcasters] all have—which I think everyone is envious of so we mustn’t lose sight of it—is the ability to reach a linear audience and tell them about the great things we’re doing elsewhere to create an ecosystem where everything can support and promote everything else. There’s always a way of finding something within the public-service bubble. That’s what we’ll continue to do. We will also continue to work with the content that mirrors every child’s experience because, again, that brings it down to a very narrow approach, but you have to be able to hold the mirror up to every kid in your audience. It’d be a really big mirror if the others had that approach. I absolutely welcome the competition and think it’s made us all think about how we work, really identify the content that we want and the producers we want to work with because we might lose the opportunity to work with them. We need to work that bit harder to make sure we still secure the right titles. Ultimately, it’s quite positive, and [public broadcasters have] really thought about how to raise their game and meet the challenges the future is going to bring.