Playdays/Playbus (1988-1997)

[NorthTonight]

A lot of people born between the mid-to-late 80's and early 2000's have fond memories of Playdays, however, when it arrived as Playbus in 1988, it was lauded by the press as the series that replaced it's long-running spiritual predecessor, Play School.

The decision was undertaken by the Head of BBC Children's programming, Anna Home, and former Play School executive producer, Cynthia Felgate, who went on to create Playdays under her independent company, Felgate Productions, (more can be read in Anna Home's 1993 book, Into the Box of Delights: A History of Children's Television).

I think Play School was in an awkward position before it's cancellation, it was too old fashioned in comparison to other children's programming at the time, but had also been modernised to the point where much of the crew felt alienated and left after many years.

Despite being born in 2000, I don't remember Playdays as fondly as it's spiritual successors, Teletubbies and Tweenies, (many of the crew on Playdays went to work on Tweenies after ironically being cancelled itself in 1997.)

I think the only people who felt really alienated where some of the pre 1983 revamp presenters who were told that they were too old at the time. Having just recently read Paul R Jackson’s excellent two volumes of “ Here’s A House “, it seems that giving the daily preschool slot to an independent company was fulfilling a quota for X amount of hours of children’s production to go outside the BBC. Despite the cancellation being announced in early 1988, it seems when Anna Home took over as controller of Children’s BBC in 1986 the writing was on the wall, which is why from that point there is an increasing number of repeats ( 133 new programmes that year and 127 repeats ). I don’t think Play School was old fashioned - it still runs in Australia and is still well received. A bit like other long running series, it just needed to continue to move with the times. I’m surprised it hasn’t been revived by the BBC.