{"id":21780,"date":"2021-10-22T08:50:45","date_gmt":"2021-10-22T12:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2021-10-25T09:23:38","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T13:23:38","slug":"bbc-childrens-sarah-muller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/bbc-childrens-sarah-muller\/","title":{"rendered":"BBC Children\u2019s Sarah Muller"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The BBC operates the most-watched kids\u2019 services in the U.K., but like pubcasters everywhere, faces its fair share of challenges. Patricia Hidalgo, the director of BBC Children\u2019s and Education, set out her vision to a group of reporters earlier this year, noting, \u201cWe 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.\u201d 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\u2019s enlisted respected kids\u2019 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 <em>TV Kids<\/em><em>\u00a0<\/em>about her content approach.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/newsletters.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/img\/2021-10-21-SARAH-MULLER.jpg\" alt=\"***Image***\" width=\"203\" height=\"197\" \/><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>Tell us about the crucial role kids\u2019 programming plays on the BBC.<br \/>\n<strong>MULLER: <\/strong>In children\u2019s, we\u2019re working for kids aged 0 to 12. For that demographic, 80 percent of the U.K.\u2019s children spend at least three-quarters of their time with us at some stage in the week. BBC Children\u2019s 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\u2019ve been in a really good position to meet the challenges thrown at us in a unique set of circumstances. We\u2019ve demonstrated our importance to our communities and societies in the last year in a way that we haven\u2019t been offered before.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>Are there content directives you must take into consideration?<br \/>\n<strong>MULLER: <\/strong>We\u2019re focused on our audience and delivering public-service value to them. It\u2019s making sure we remain focused on a really good sweep of different types of content, from factual through to drama. It\u2019s also about the type of work we do and where we do it. We\u2019re 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\u2019s how we work our quota system.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>What kinds of acquisitions are you eyeing?<br \/>\n<strong>MULLER: <\/strong>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\u2019s 6 to 9, 2D, character-driven comedy animations that we\u2019ve 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\u2019t have tons of violence and sexual stereotyping. We\u2019re always looking for films. Apart from that, we\u2019re looking for the lovely, holistic, unexpected thing that we haven\u2019t made ourselves, we probably wouldn\u2019t make ourselves, but that tells a really great story, shows a different way of life, somewhere else in the world that isn\u2019t in the modern, contemporary U.K. kids\u2019 experience. We\u2019re always looking to be surprised by the unexpected.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>Tell us about the recent restructure based on age and combining the commissioning and acquisitions teams.<br \/>\n<strong>MULLER: <\/strong>We\u2019re trying to make sure that we reflect the audience and their needs in a more proactive way. It\u2019s become clear that, for us, channels were potentially quite limiting in terms of how we reach different children. If you weren\u2019t careful, you would end up picking the same narrow-gauge group of content over and over again. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve got 0 to 3 and 4 to 6. Within my group, 7 to 12, you\u2019ve 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\u2019re putting things, how we\u2019re telling different parts of the audience about what we\u2019re doing. It also makes us able to be honest with ourselves about the need for business structure and brands within what we\u2019re doing, even within public service. We do have to make sure we\u2019re still entertaining and engaging kids within public service. There\u2019s no point in making terribly worthy shows that nobody wants to watch. We\u2019re hoping this will help us strategize around where the great things we\u2019re already doing will need to land and how to land them. It\u2019s about working more closely with audiences. It\u2019s about getting ourselves battle-ready, future-proof, making sure the BBC\u2014which is 100 years old soon\u2014is going to be able to meet the challenges of the next 100 years.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>Tell us more about addressing diversity and inclusivity in your programming remit.<br \/>\n<strong>MULLER: <\/strong>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\u2019ve done well. What we\u2019ve 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\u2019ll all be the beneficiaries of widening our net beyond the narrow pool of people we tend to draw from. For the BBC, diversity isn\u2019t just about ethnicity. It\u2019s 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\u2019re definitely going to make it work. It\u2019s very important, and this is the time we have to get it right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS: <\/strong>How do you see the competitive landscape now since the emergence of global SVOD and AVOD services catering to kids?<\/p>\n<p><strong>MULLER: <\/strong>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\u2019re trying to think on that scale, sometimes you miss things\u2014the emotional beats, the curiosity. We\u2019ve all got something that our audience is looking for. I think that\u2019s harder to do if you\u2019re trying to think very, very big off the page, rather than, \u201cThis is just the right thing to do off the page.\u201d I still think they struggle enormously with discoverability. Yes, they\u2019ve got lots of choice, but I struggle to find things I want to watch, to discover something new, without opinion pieces that I\u2019ve read online that might direct me to something. It\u2019s even harder for kids. It\u2019s really hard to find the brands that are for you. The thing that [public broadcasters] all have\u2014which I think everyone is envious of so we mustn\u2019t lose sight of it\u2014is the ability to reach a linear audience and tell them about the great things we\u2019re doing elsewhere to create an ecosystem where everything can support and promote everything else. There\u2019s always a way of finding something within the public-service bubble. That\u2019s what we\u2019ll continue to do. We will also continue to work with the content that mirrors every child\u2019s 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\u2019d be a really big mirror if the others had that approach. I absolutely welcome the competition and think it\u2019s 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\u2019s quite positive, and [public broadcasters have] really thought about how to raise their game and meet the challenges the future is going to bring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The executive, who oversees content for the 7-plus set, talks about her approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":350,"featured_media":21781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[1351,1842],"class_list":["post-21780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","category-top-stories","tag-bbc-childrens","tag-sarah-muller","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>BBC Children\u2019s Sarah Muller - TVKIDS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/bbc-childrens-sarah-muller\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"BBC Children\u2019s Sarah Muller - 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