Which CBeebies White Men Would You Sack To Make Room For Diversity?

[FoodUnit]

I'm fed up with the surplus white able-bodied men in children's programmes - especially those who really aren't all that. I mean Justin Fletcher and Chris from Show Me Show Me seem to have got in on talent - but Andy from Andy's Wild Adventures - what's the deal with him? Same for Mr Bloom and Alex. It would be really easy to replace these white men with more diverse presenters.

The same goes for cartoons like Mike the Knight- why don't they, just at the commissioning stage, have a process where they ask: Does this character actually NEED to be an able-bodied white male? If not, they could change them to somebody other than an ABWM. Wouldn't that be great?

So I'm just interested in knowing who else you think could be binned without any great loss in the name of diversity?

Did anybody hear Kay Cargill being supposedly taken to task about this a few weeks on Woman's Hour? AFAIR they also interviewed a person to defend the programmes and a person putting the case that programmes such as Everything's Rosie and Zingzillas put women and girls either in places of powerlessness (Drum for example is inarticulate, everything's rosie consistently (deliberately?) misses opportunities). The person defending the programmes said that her son(s) watched and enjoyed them too. I thought "how is it better that boys are also being fed this claptrap and reinforcing what they already see all around them"?

I don't believe this stuff about boys not wanting to watch female characters. We only have Swedish TV in our house (I'm Swedish and the dc are bilingual and need to hear someone other than me speak Swedish). In Swedish children's tv, there are lots of interesting female characters and boys still love them. My ds's favourite show ever was about a detective office which was run by a young girl who went off and had amazing adventures and solved crimes, with her male side-kick. I find it hard to believe that British young children are already so closed minded that they couldn't enjoy a good story. I think it's parents and tv producers projecting their own ideas onto children.

I always thought that the reason that there were more male presenters on cbeebies, was to provide role models for children who don't have fathers in their lives. Most children have mothers and/ or female teachers but many don't have positive male influences. Positive male role models benefit both sexes!

Totally agree. The problem is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time they are a bit bigger, boys therefore CAN'T relate to main female characters. For example, in my experience, teaching Austen at A-level to a mixed class is totally ruined by boys casting up their eyes and whining about how borrrrring it is.

Totally agree with teddybare I mean - I think there are an adequate supply of male role models in pop culture....all doing the good jobs...

...and being tolerated (or at least sympathised with), I imagine, Lavender. (Not by you, but in general.)

Whereas if I'd said that Macbeth was boorrrrrrring because it was all about MEN and their BATTLES and their silly AMBITIONS TO BECOME KING everyone would have thought I was an idiot or needed to improve my ideas a bit.

Sorry that was re: A-Levels.

ElephantsAndMiasmas... I find that I do roll my eyes these days and think 'boring......' about just about everything. I am SO bored of the over-representation of men, (white & able-bodied), what they think, what they do, what they want, how they see things......yawn........

Nina and the Neurons is good. There's also Katy on i can cook (although they programme would be considerably improved if they took away the guitar) but that is still stereotypical woman in kitchen clap trap.

Erm...

DD was about three, and watching Cbeebies and she said "mummy, why are there more men than women on TV, that's not like real life is it?"

And it's true, if you did a sweep of TV and extrapolated out to the population as a whole you would assume:
most of the population are under 35
about 1/4 of the population get to over 45
very few people achieve old age
men outnumber women by at least 3 to 1
all non human characters are by default male, unless there is specific reason for them not to be such as required to be caring or get upset

However, as my DH pointed out, nearly all the Cbeebies and daytime TV programmes are produced by women so nearly all the men presenters are good looking and non-threatening

Please can we exterminate fire Mr Maker too? I think some older presenters would be nice to see too, and every time I see the annoyingly hyper Mr Maker I wish my kids had the lovely Tony Hart that I loved watching as a child.

Elephants, you may be too young to remember the Vicky The Viking cartoons. Vicky dressed like a boy though had plaits, was at the centre of lots of adventurous storylines.... and actually was a boy. Me and many of my contemporaries were never quite sure about his/her gender, but further investigation once the internet was invented revealed he was definitely meant to be male

Octonauts - there are 2 female characters, Tweak and Dashi. Tweak is an engineer who built all the Gups but the two of them rarely leave the Octopod and neither is one of the main three characters (Kwasi, Barnacles, Peso). I always thought the Vegimals (who make the fish biscuits and barnacle biscuits and kelp cakes) were of indeterminate gender but my dcs are currently insisting they are all girls.

I just had a conversation with my 3 year old where she revealed her conviction that Peso and Captain Barnacle(s?) were both girls. Whereas Zingzillas she was spot-on. I reckon she was helped by that wearning pink, flowers, and hair-twidling that is so undeniably linkied with the XX chromosome.

As someone has already pointed out, there are at least two female characters in the 'Pod. And Tweak identifies as queer, but Peso's still closeted, so there's a bit of a sexuality spectrum. Also - Professor Inkling is disabled, which is why he doesn't go on missions. So Octonauts is doing ok tbf.

Tokenism just isn't good enough though.
If we were grading CBeebies shows for equal representation Octonauts would get something like a C minus.

Not sure every programme can be a Benetton ad.

"Not sure every programme can be a Benetton ad."
How about more like reality, where 50% of people are female. Also, how about having an entire family who aren't white, etc...

" So Octonauts is doing ok tbf."
No the under-representation of females is not okay. And I don't think having gay/sexually ambiguous males is a fair representation of female either ... like on chat-shows in the evening- its okay to have a bloke in a dress as a host, or a highly camp one, but a risk too far to have them female (unless they are young, inexperienced and bound to fail like Charlotte Church, Kelly Brooke or Lily Allen).

AHA my kind of thread

On Octonauts (my specialist subject for 10)

Tweak and the one who takes photos are female. The one who takes photos is very girly. They rarely go out adventuring.
Tunip the Vegimal is a vegimal. They are vegimals. They do not come in boy type or girl type.

That leave the 3 main characters - you call tell it is them as they are the ones at the start of the theme song:

BARNACLES... KWAZI... PESO (starts to sing)

Plus they are the ones who are usually doing the adventuring and all the action.

Leaving Professor thingy who stays in the octopod and has a huge brain and gives them the missions and is also male. And the shellington chap who does some kind of research.

It's basically 4 male leads doing all the stuff with some of the more minor roles afforded to females and of course the unsexed (is that a word) vegimal. And some more blokes, obv.

However we do have an octonauts book and I have to say the illustrations are really nice

thanks for that authoritative breakdown of Octonauts SardineQueen :)

Dashi is the dog who takes photos (sauci dog in the books), she's female as is Tweak, the fixit bunny who mends the ships.
The adventurer, medic, scientist, brainy type and captain are all male and they're the ones who go out on missions.

FWIW, I feel the Vegemals are the most oppressed though, poor feckers.

Oh don't worry Sue, we like it.
Barnacle biscuit anyone?

You're conditioned to, Tunip. Tis very sad.