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About The |
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The Great Channel 4 Controversy |
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North Americans who grew up listening to the Mini Pops albums in the 1980s probably had no idea that in England -- the group's home country -- controversy was raging over their creation. The following is excerpted from the book Daddy's Girl: Young Girls And Popular Culture by British professor Valerie Walkerdine. In her book, published in 1997, Walkerdine devotes a whole chapter to the Mini Pops, shown as a television program (the television segments were later repackaged by K-tel as videos in North America) on Britain's Channel 4 in 1983. Walkerdine suggests that the Mini Pops controversy came about largely because of class differences among the British, with members of the working class showing admiration for the precociousness that would lead regular, working class kids like the Mini Pops to success (and, by extension, into the middle class), and members of the middle class trying to keep working class kids down by arguing that such precociousness was disturbingly sexual and the result of exploitation. (Of course Walkerdine's explanation is not this simplistic; thus, I have included links to Chapters online bookstore [in Canada] and Amazon.com [in the U.S.] so you can read the whole book for yourself.) |
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from Daddy's Girl: Young Girls And Popular Culture by Valerie Walkerdine |
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Harvard University Press, 1997. |
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"Minipops", made in 1982 by Mike Mansfield for Channel 4, which is a [relatively] highbrow channel, did not share the same fate [as the British kids' talent show "Saturday Superstore's 'Search For A Star"']. It became the object of heated controversy in the press, mainly I suspect, because middle-class people watched it who would not have batted an eyelid otherwise. It is quite startling that "Minipops" is very tame compared with "Saturday Superstore" and indeed compared to "Popskool" [another similar show produced for video in the 1980s], and that nobody had thought to question such issues before. The British Film Institute filed its press cuttings for "Minipops" under the heading, "moral panics."
The series was thought up by Martin Wyatt, a record producer, whose daughter and friends were always imitating pop stars. Indeed, these children made a record that became a hit, at least in France and Canada. Wyatt saw the series as providing a showcase for all those children who imitate pop stars in their bedrooms. The idea was put to Channel 4 and the pop video-maker Mike Mansfield was brought in to direct a series of six half-hour programmes to be screened at 6 pm. |
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Buy this book at:
Chapters.ca Amazon.com |
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That it did indeed tap into children's fantasies was amply demonstrated by the thousands of children and mums who turned up for the auditions: busloads of children from all over the country who came despite a rail strike. Mansfield made a documentary, "Don't Do It Mrs. Worthington," using footage of the auditions. These showed clearly the young children, girls and boys, queueing up for and performing in the auditions. Like those for Annie auditions before them, they were keen, excited, accomplished. Let us not forget that many of these very young children did sing and dance extremely well and many went to classes of some sort or other.
The six shows present children aged from eight to twelve in a setting which was designed to look like a milk bar. There are brightly coloured cushions, balloons, a structure resembling a climbing frame and a small bar and diminutive bar stools. While all the songs are popsongs, they are far more restrained and less erotic than "Saturday Superstore"'s "Gloria" or "Oh Mickey." They are songs like the punk, Toyah's "Happy Birthday", "When I'm Sixty-Four," and so on. Even "Satisfaction" fails to come across as very erotic. But what really seemed to get the broadsheet press shouting was the fact that the children, girls in particular, wore make-up, sometimes quite a lot of it, and according to the producers, wanted even more. It was this that spelled sexuality and eroticism to the critics and it was this that uniformly among the broadsheets produced loss of innocent childhood arguments. According to The Sunday Times, the children were "lasciviously courting the camera. This is aggravated by lashings of make-up on mini-mouths and rippling leather wrappings around embryo biceps ... In the twinkling of an eye the childhood of these children seems to have been stolen from them. (The Sunday Times, 13 March 1983, p. 36)
On February 27, The Sunday Times had also remarked on the "disturbingly explicit sexuality" (p. 5). The Observer questioned whether such performances were too explicitly sexual: |
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Is it merely priggish to feel queasy at the sight of primary school minxes with rouged cheeks, eye make-up and full-gloss lipstick belting out songs like torch singers and waggling those places where they will eventually have places? The final act of last week's show featured a chubby blonde totlette, thigh-high to a paedophile, in a ra-ra skirt and high heels; her black knickers were extensively flashed as she bounced around singing the words "See that guy all dressed in green/He's not a man, he's a loving machine." Kiddiporn, a shop-window full of junior jailbait? And does the show thrust premature sexual awareness onto its wide-eyed performers? (Observer, 27 February 1983, p. 40). |
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The middle-brow paper, the Daily Mail, had a whole page on "The slaying of childhood," which used "Minipops" to bolster the argument made by Neil Postman in his book, The Disappearance of Childhood, that television fails to protect children from the grosser experiences of life and in doing so puts and end to childhood itself. The Mail argues that in "Minipops" the children "cavort in front of the cameras in make-up, provocative clothes and erotic postures" (18 March 1983). It was the tabloids which took an entirely different line, one which failed to mention childhood innocence or criticism, but concentrated exclusively on the talent and fame angle. The Daily Mirror told us that "The minis will sing and dance their way into your hearts" and that "the children ... are out to prove that they are just as talented as The Kids from Fame" (24 January 1983). Again on March 8, 1983, the Mirror concentrated on the idea of tomorrow's talent, quoting Mike Mansfield as saying that "a few of them could become very big names." The Daily Express discussed the auditions sympathetically in July of 1982 (6 July 1982, p. 3) and on February 9, 1983, found the show "unnatural, precocious and disarmingly entertaining" (p. 25). The Caribbean Times of February 18, 1983, had a piece on the black children in the show, with the emphasis on talent, stating that the children like to sing and dance around the house, make up their own dances to pop records and know all the words to "Fame."
Here then clearly articulated are the two contradictory discourses that I have been highlighting ... On the one hand little girls sing and dance to pop songs all the time and this is no bad thing because they can use their talent, get selected and become famous, on the other their very selection takes away their childhood by introducing premature sexuality and leaves them open to the abuse of paedophilia. It is absolutely no surprise that it is the tabloid press that emphasizes the former and the broadsheets the latter, because this is overwhelmingly a matter of class difference. |
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