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I’ve just come back from six days in Munich at the 2012 Prix Jeunesse International Children’s Television Festival.  Fantastic.  A biennial festival and competition bringing together children’s programming from over seventy countries with the intention of improving the quality of children’s television world wide, deepening understanding and promoting communication between cultures.  I read the brochure.

To be fair, if you were there I think you’d agree that the festival achieved all that.  This year’s theme was ‘watch, learn and grow with children’s TV.  And I did.  The watching was extreme: 85 shows in competition, plus about 400 available to screen outside.  The learning was extensive: from what it’s like to have or live with autism, to how to wash a willy, to how to make mohitos, to what challenges programme makers face in places like Bhutan (not saying where I learned what or from whom).  And the growing was, perhaps too much growing: Kartoffelsalat how I love thee. So…

Jayne’s best bits:

• Hearing the surprise when the audience having hailed Gumball as brilliant discovered it is a Cartoon Network show.  Hotly followed by the delight that it comes out of London.
• Seeing the South African contingent at breakfast the morning after the night before.
• Watching Waffle Heart and Leave Me Alone: the current wave of great drama series from Scandanavia isn’t just for grown ups.

Jayne’s Worst bits:

• Learning of some unsporting tweeting – to win a Prix Jeunesse means good business.  How naive of me to think it was about the kids.
• Seeing too much stuff where girls are only concerned with their looks and defined in relation to boys.
• When they ran out of rum.

If you were there, I’d be interested to know what your best and worst bits were.

The range of shows from across the world was fascinating – seeing how different cultures respond to our stuff, learning what they enjoy, or don’t.  I admit I felt a  little disappointed though: I went expecting to be overwhelmed by brilliant new content and style.  But nothing seemed truly innovative or daring.  In fact too much seemed to use the bells and whistles of commercial American shows.  However, without the tight construction of a well crafted script, such imitations were poor.

Oh one other thing I learned watching all this stuff:  we are so lucky in the UK.  Our content makers are among the best in the world.  Companies like The Foundation, Kindle Entertainment, Darrall and MacQueen, Plug-In Media… the inhouse productions from CBBC and CBeebies… they are beacons of brilliance.   I hope I wasn’t the only person to notice this and that rather than aping commercial American stuff, overseas broadcasters get inspired by UK storytelling and production values and so buy our programmes AS WELL AS finding their own ways of telling stories that will feed back and inspire me.