Ofcom's ban on junk food advertising during children's TV broadcasting has prompted a predictable chorus of whingeing. Advertisers hate it - well no surprise there - but I did raise an eyebrow at the outcry from programme makers bemoaning the estimated £39m cut in their budgets. Anne Wood, creator of Teletubbies, was banging on in a high-minded tone about protecting the rights of children to have television made for them. Jocelyn Hay, the chairman of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer saw the ban as the "final nail in the coffin of British-made children's programming" and denounced it as disproportionate.
The only thing that is disproportionate here is the increasingly corpulent form of the nation's youth, fattened up on a diet of junk food peddled to them at 10-minute intervals by the Gary Linekers and Ronald McDonalds of the world.
It is predicted that a third of Britain's under-11s will be obese by 2010, so Ofcom's ban - which should have included all programming up until the 9pm watershed - strikes me as wholly inadequate when you consider the scale of the problem. But what shocks me more is the way that programme makers are not embarrassed to acknowledge that they have been using the junk food industry's dirty money to subsidise their endeavours. Where is their morality? Why not fund children's programmes with revenue from cigarette or arms sales?
Even the prospect of losing some children's TV programmes doesn't cause me to shed a tear. British children watch too much TV anyway. Innumerable studies have pointed to the relationship between TV watching and weight gain. Plonking the kids down in front of the TV and plugging them into the stupor induced by the flickering screen beats a shot of Ritalin, the chemical cosh, but they would be much better off doing almost anything else.
TV programme makers try to claim the moral high ground, but they make no more sense than the schizophrenic sporting fraternity, people who see no contradiction, for example, in promoting sport on health grounds while raking in cash from the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonald's as sponsors of the Olympics. Broadcasters and sports bodies need to cut their dependency on their junk food subsidy and find creative alternative ways of financing projects or they become part of the whole big, fat problem.
The only thing that is disproportionate here is the increasingly corpulent form of the nation's youth, fattened up on a diet of junk food peddled to them at 10-minute intervals by the Gary Linekers and Ronald McDonalds of the world.
It is predicted that a third of Britain's under-11s will be obese by 2010, so Ofcom's ban - which should have included all programming up until the 9pm watershed - strikes me as wholly inadequate when you consider the scale of the problem. But what shocks me more is the way that programme makers are not embarrassed to acknowledge that they have been using the junk food industry's dirty money to subsidise their endeavours. Where is their morality? Why not fund children's programmes with revenue from cigarette or arms sales?
Even the prospect of losing some children's TV programmes doesn't cause me to shed a tear. British children watch too much TV anyway. Innumerable studies have pointed to the relationship between TV watching and weight gain. Plonking the kids down in front of the TV and plugging them into the stupor induced by the flickering screen beats a shot of Ritalin, the chemical cosh, but they would be much better off doing almost anything else.
TV programme makers try to claim the moral high ground, but they make no more sense than the schizophrenic sporting fraternity, people who see no contradiction, for example, in promoting sport on health grounds while raking in cash from the likes of Coca-Cola and McDonald's as sponsors of the Olympics. Broadcasters and sports bodies need to cut their dependency on their junk food subsidy and find creative alternative ways of financing projects or they become part of the whole big, fat problem.
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