Rewind and replay? Television and play in the 1950s/1960s and 2010s

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the way in which television's impact on children's play has changed over the past 60 years. The UK has unique collections of children's playground games and rhymes. The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie collected children's playground games and rhymes in the 1950s–1980s and their collection is deposited at the Bodleian Library. A recent study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Beyond Text programme, ‘Children's playground games and songs in the new media age’ involved an ethnographic study of two primary school playgrounds in England over a 2-year period (2009–2011). This was followed by a project which involved interviewing some of the Opies' child contributors, now adults aged 50–70, and their contemporaries, about their memories of play and its relationship to media and commercial markets. In this paper, data from both projects are compared in order to trace changes over time in the influence of media and the market on children's play. This paper considers the data on television and play and outlines the way in which there are both continuities and discontinuities in this play. Key continuities relate to the way in which television is drawn upon in children's imaginative play, as children today continue to draw on characters, narratives and language from television in their play episodes in ways that were similar to those of the past. Differences include the way in which new genres of television programmes now inform play, such as reality television.