Classical Music in British Children’s Television: Narrative, Communication, and Cultural Meaning

Golding, Rosemary (2024). Classical Music in British Children’s Television: Narrative, Communication, and Cultural Meaning. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (In press).

Abstract

Recent work on film, video game and advertisement music has drawn on concepts of narrative, communication and signification to investigate the use of pre-existing, specifically classical, music in new contexts. Classical music is also used to great effect in some examples of children’s television. In some cases this mirrors examples from the adult screen world. In a children’s programme, however, this provokes new questions about different levels of intent and perception, combination of narrative with new elements of codification and cue, and the role of television in educating and perpetuating classical tropes and stereotypes. This article takes three case studies, Hey Duggee, Clangers, and Alphablocks, which make very different uses of classical music, as a basis for exploring notions of classical excerpts as vehicles for narrative and meaning. In the case of Hey Duggee, I argue that the multiple meanings of the classical extracts chosen combine to create a register of communication aimed at adult viewers which provides humour as well as a sense of community via shared cultural experience. Clangers deals more generally with issues of meaning and narrative, while Alphablocks invites consideration of the ways in which classical music is characterised and depicted on screen. Together, the three studies also offer new perspectives on the place and meaning of classical music in twenty-first-century popular culture.

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