© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
‘Crazyspace’: the politics of children's screen drama
Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Media Research in the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. She has written and lectured widely on the politics of media provision for young audiences. Her books include: Television is Good for Your Kids (Hilary Shipman, 1989), Fake, Fact and Fantasy: Children's Interpretation of Television Reality (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997) and ‘Dear BBC’: Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her recent research is concerned with the contrasting areas of children's understanding of media representations of conflict, and children's responses to television humour
This essay examines the spaces, both metaphorical and actual, of children's screen fiction from a number of perspectives: political; institutional; generic; textual. Drawing on examples from children's television drama such as the BBC's The Demon Headmaster and The Face at the Window, and from feature films such as Billy Elliott and City of God, the essay discusses generic distinctions between screen drama for children and screen drama about children. It argues that screen drama demonstrating children's moral agency and narrative centrality is a unique and specialized genre, not least because of its creative freedom through forms such as fantasy, fairytale and animation, as well as through realistic child-centred storytelling. As such, the provision of children's screen drama should be incorporated into policy and regulatory arrangements for the media in the UK and Europe.