Alice Webb

The BBC’s children’s programming division is at the heart of the U.K.’s kids’ content sector. CBBC and CBeebies are market leaders, entertaining and educating preschoolers and kids with a slate of home-grown commissions, as well as a selection of co-productions and acquisitions. As the director of BBC Children’s, Alice Webb is tasked with keeping CBBC, CBeebies and the new BBC iPlayer Kids app in pole position. As she tells TV Kids, she also is preparing the division for changes set out in the White Paper outlining the future of the BBC.

TV KIDS: What was your strategy coming into the role of director of BBC Children’s last year?
WEBB: My big priority was to keep making amazing, high-quality content for U.K. kids—content they can call their own—and to keep moving us forward to make sure that we are in the places that children need and want us to be. It was as straightforward as that. Stay connected, stay relevant and be there in the way kids need us and want us.

TV KIDS: The White Paper released this May laid out a blueprint for the future of the BBC. What are the ramifications for your division?
WEBB: The White Paper is the result of the Charter negotiations that have gone on between the BBC and the government. Children’s has very much been a priority in the conversation. [The White Paper] puts BBC Children’s even more at the top of the to-do list for the BBC. We made a pledge to do a new service called iPlay as part of the next Charter period. There are changes for us. There is the loss of the in-house guarantee, and there is the introduction of a contestable fund for the making of more children’s content and other kinds of minority content in the U.K. Neither of [those directives] change our strategy: we are still focused on high-quality U.K. content. We’ve been subject to competing for our content for many, many years, so it’s not a massive difference.

TV KIDS: How are you working with BBC Worldwide and others to develop original programming that can resonate locally and be exported outside of the U.K.?
WEBB: We do that predominantly with BBC Worldwide, but BBC Children’s also does that with other partners, [including] FremantleMedia Kids & Family. We’re pretty entrepreneurial. We have our core public-service purposes that we’re trying to fulfill, which means that we cover every genre—drama, comedy, entertainment, factual, news, current affairs. Where there is a crossover, we will work with an international partner. Take for example The Worst Witch, our biggest children’s drama to date. It’s a co-production between us and ZDF Enterprises and it also has investment from Netflix. We have a relationship with BBC Worldwide, who are very much partners with us, particularly in the preschool area. So Go Jetters, for example, which is a hugely popular new animation, BBC Worldwide co-produced it with us, and they are the distributor too. We have quite a diverse range of partners from other broadcasters to digital platforms to distributors to producers.

TV KIDS: Kids’ TV broadcasters are under pressure in many markets. How are you managing to constrain costs and keep quality on screen?
WEBB: Our sector is always under budget pressures, but we’ve done well in the BBC to withstand them. While the BBC has been subject to severe financial pressures, we have managed through efficiencies to make sure we keep as much money on screen as possible. So over the last five years, the BBC has taken 25 percent out of our cost base, and a very small proportion of that has been [taken from the content budget]. In BBC Children’s, 94 pence to the pound goes on content for us. That will be the case as we move forward, too. The BBC has put Children’s as a priority through this next Charter period. That doesn’t mean we won’t be subject to efficiency targets and all the rest of it—we will, that’s just good business—but it double underlines the BBC’s continued commitment to children’s public-service broadcasting.

TV KIDS: What does quality on screen mean for you?
WEBB: Eighty percent of our content is U.K.-originated, reflecting the variety and diversity of children’s lives as they are growing up. They can learn, they can laugh, they can make sense of the world around them. It needs to be distinctive. We’re not about derivative things. We are about high production values and quality.

TV KIDS: Tell me about the BBC iPlayer Kids launch and the Big Digital Plan for Children.
WEBB: The Big Digital Plan for Children, we could have just called it the BBC’s Big Plan for Children. The word “digital” was just to underline that that is the big shift for our audience. It goes back to what I spoke about originally—making sure that we can continue to deliver amazing content that kids love, and make sure we stay connected to them in all the places that they are in the world today. So there are six challenges we’ve given ourselves as part of the Big Digital Plan. The first is delivering distinctive, high-quality, noisy content that stands out from the crowd in a very busy landscape. The second is making sure we deliver content in the way that kids want it, which is why you saw us launch the iPlayer for kids. On-demand viewing is hugely popular with our audience. Of the BBC’s iPlayer in general, a third of that viewing, the single largest genre, is kids. You’ll see a similar phenomenon reflected in platforms like Netflix. Part of our big plan is also making sure that we’re not just delivering content, it’s more than that. That’s why our third priority is to help children grow the skills that will help them thrive in the digital world so that they can connect, create and share. And creativity is an important thread that runs through everything. It’s not just about passive consumption for our audience. It’s about getting them creating too. The fourth element of our challenge is making sure that we are delivering the whole of the BBC to children. Kids love far more of the BBC’s content than what is just made by the children’s department, whether that’s Strictly Come Dancing or MasterChef. We want to make that as accessible as possible. The fifth thing is being a trusted guide. This is about us bringing all of our public-service values into the digital space, in the way that we’ve done in the physical and the linear spaces for the last 90 years. Whether that’s helping kids navigate their world safely online or helping parents to feel confident as their children are taking their first digital steps. The last part of the plan is about reflecting and promoting the U.K. That’s first and foremost in our content—making sure we reflect every part of our wonderfully colorful country and every child growing up here. And [promoting] our industry as well. We’re the cornerstone of the U.K. children’s industry. It’s a hugely diverse, resilient, entrepreneurial and high-quality industry that I am very proud that we can shout about and support with our commissions and on the international stage.

TV KIDS: What’s your sense of the effects Brexit will have on kids’ content producers in the U.K.?
WEBB: To a certain extent it’s too early to tell. There will be changes in funding models. There are a couple of things worth hanging on to. First of all, children’s content and the international profile and strategic priority of children’s content have increased. You can see that reflected in the way Netflix has launched a huge amount of original children’s content. For SVOD providers, having kids’ content is a necessary part of your arsenal. So there is more demand for children’s content internationally. And if you’re looking for children’s content, it doesn’t take very long to come to U.K. shores. The other thing is, the children’s industry has always been entrepreneurial, it has always shifted and changed. We had massive shifts in our funding base about seven or eight years ago in the U.K. with the changes in the advertising laws. I’m confident that the industry will be resilient, and it will adapt. We don’t know the details yet, but there is plenty of reason to think that it will carry on in good health.

TV KIDS: As you look ahead, what are some of your other priorities?
WEBB: It’s absolutely about distinctive, high-quality content. One of the areas that we are looking at as part of our plan is the older end of our audience. Do we want to do any more in that space? We recently extended our broadcast hours for CBBC, so we’ve added another two hours a day. The thing for us to do is bring those six threads that I talked about, our priorities in our Big Digital Plan, together over the next 12 months—to bring them to life, to make them real. And the exciting thing is that at the end of next year, December 5 to 7, 2017, the BBC is hosting the World Summit on Media for Children here in Manchester. That will be a real opportunity for us to play host to international partners—children’s content makers, policy makers, technical platform providers—and talk about quality content connecting with children in the way they want it. It will be an exciting 12 to 18 months for us.