Saturday Mash-Up! will look to follow the past successes of Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Going Live! and Live & Kicking this weekend when live children’s entertainment returns to the BBC on a Saturday morning for the first time in nearly a decade.
The team behind the show, which unlike its predecessors will air on BBC2 rather than BBC1, have pledged to bring back the features that made live Saturday morning children’s television so popular in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – including celebrity guests, games and gunge.
In a reference to how food programmes such as Saturday Kitchen have taken over Saturday and Sunday morning television in the absence of children’s TV, the producer of the new series, Jamie Wilson, said: “We like to think that anything can happen on this show, except cookery.”
Saturday Mash-Up! will be presented by Yasmin Evans, who hosts Radio 1Xtra’s weekday afternoon programme, and Jonny Nelson, an entertainment and sports reporter who has also done standup comedy. They will be joined by the CBBC character Hacker T Dog.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of families, a lot of the older generation, who’ll just switch on and see it,” Nelson said. “It makes for a much broader audience.”
The show could kickstart a new era of children’s programming on the leading British channels. The BBC has not aired a live children’s programme on a Saturday morning since TMi in 2009. Going Live! and Live & Kicking attracted millions of viewers when they aired from 1987-93 and 1993-2001 respectively. ITV also enjoyed success with SM:TV Live until it was cancelled in 2003.
Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC, said this year that the corporation would make its biggest investment in homegrown childrens’ programming for a generation to compete with the shift to online viewing and the growth of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.
This spending – a £34m increase in the budget over three years – was pledged after the media regulator asked the BBC to produce more programming for children. Ofcom is also reviewing whether the other public service broadcasters, including ITV and Channel 4, should be doing more after an amendment to the Digital Economy Act this year gave the regulator the power to push for more spending on children’s programmes.
Ofcom said: “Programmes for children and young people play a central role in public service broadcasting, and we’re currently reviewing how children’s needs are being met across these channels.”
Cheryl Taylor, the controller of CBBC, said the corporation could “absolutely” continue to compete with digital rivals to attract child viewers. She said there were 300m downloads of children’s programmes on iPlayer every year. “CBBC and CBeebies are the most popular channel destinations in the country [for children]. The BBC is still right in there for what we offer children,” she said.
Asked why children’s Saturday morning TV had been replaced by food programmes, she said: “Cooking shows have replaced everything. Who knows? Is it because there was a mature audience because kids were doing their own thing? We are hoping to be the gunge alternative to culinary expertise.”
Taylor said she was thrilled to be launching the new Saturday morning show. “Everyone remembers their own Saturday morning TV experiences, like Trevor McDonald on Tiswas and those sorts of things,” she said.
She said her ambition for Saturday Mash-Up! was that the “buzz” around the return of Saturday morning children’s TV would snowball. “I would love that the huge amount of interest from the announcement – the buzz and visibility – continues for the run of the series,” Taylor said.
