Attentiveness and Pleasure

I was alerted to the likely importance of focused attention in September 2012 in the viewing event I filmed on 13^th September 2011 (after ITNG 1 and 2; see Section 4.1). In my analysis for the ITNG sequence I noticed more evidence of it. There are many occasions in these viewings, and indeed in almost all my videos, where one or both of the children are apparently oblivious to everything in the room apart from the television. Adult utterances seem to be ignored (though of course this is not to say that they may not still be heard); the child[ren]’s gaze is fixed on the screen; they often approach the screen and get as close to it as they can. These occasions can be sustained for several minutes during which the child involved is intensely attentive to the screen.

During the flow of movement and talk in ITNG1, there is a period of ten minutes, starting at 05:41:00, during which both children watch the screen attentively, apart from a few brief interruptions, through short narrative sequences involving the Tombliboo and Pontipine characters. Connie spends most of this time standing at the coffee table as in Figures 3.6 and 3.7; Alfie is switched from Terry’s lap to mine, and from mine to the potty and back again, during all of which he endeavours to keep his eyes focused on the screen; then each child is given a bottle of milk, which they drink holding the bottles at an angle so that they can see the screen (see also Figure 5.10). For much of this time Connie holds her right hand ready to point at the screen (Figure 3.12).

Figure 3.12: adults converse; children drink and watch: ITNG1 (aged 1;10)

At times either Phoebe or I utter comments, or converse with each other, as in the Pontipine sequence during the discovery of the missing Pontipine children, during which Phoebe holds Connie’s milk bottle so that she can suck, watch and maintain her right hand position all at the same time (as in Figure 3.12):

CB [chuckling] It’s like an advertisement for passive TV viewing!

C Oh! points [OS PP babies pop out of flower pot]

CB He’s in the flowerpot

P How did they fit in there? [OS counting] No way! No! No!

goodness. All the children? They were in a teeny tiny one? I can’t believe it [pops her finger in cheek as PPs pop out/VO counting/children take no notice; P tucks C’s hair behind ear]

CB There’s some some quite funny stuff online about the Pontipines...

This pattern of adult exchanges of remarks, interspersed with commentary by Phoebe about the event on the screen and by periods of quiet attentiveness by all four of us, continues until the

“story” section of the programme concludes, as always, with Jacobi saying “Isn’t that a pip?” For most of this ten-minute period, including the 45 seconds when Phoebe is loudly “modelling”

responses to the Pontipine children’s reappearance, the children do not seem seem to notice what Phoebe and I say or do. They are intent on the images, movement and sound coming from the screen. Within a month – that is, by ITNG4 on 23^rd November – these periods of intense attention were much longer, and often involved one or both children kneeling on the stool, close to the screen and sometimes touching it. In ITNG3 and 4, everyone involved was a bit more relaxed about the videoing of viewing sessions and the whole business of overnight stays at our house. Although both sessions included moments of adult confusion and impatience about practical and child management issues, and a great deal of non-viewing activity by the children, there were also moments of focused attention.

In ITNG3, Alfie climbs up to kneel on the stool in front of the screen, but Phoebe wants him to move so that Connie can watch too, saying “Now sit down, sit like that, put your legs down, ok, I don’t want you getting too close; remember it’s bad for your eyes and you need to let Connie see.” Alfie looks over his shoulder a couple of times but is quickly engrossed in the introduction of Macca Pacca, a character he knows well both as a toy and as an on-screen figure. He reaches up at one point to gently lay the flat of his hand on the corner of the screen. Connie is sat down

next to him, but soon moves off-screen to investigate other interesting objects around the room; Alfie settles down to watch Macca Pacca build a pile of stones, gripping the edge of the trolley and looking up and down the pile as the voice-over counts them (Figure 3.13). He watches this sequence intently until the pile of six stones is triumphantly completed and celebrated by Macca Pacca. Then follows the event where Alfie abandons his seated position and scrambles to his knees so that he can reach the toucan’s beak (see Figure 3.9).

Figure 3.13: Alfie watches another stone being added to the pile: ITNG3 (aged 1;11)

A similar event occurs with Connie two weeks later, in ITNG4. I am on my own with the children;

ITNG itself has just ended and the CBeebies Bedtime Story is being announced. The children had been quite distracted by toys and other items around the room and I am ready to turn off the TV when Connie says she wants to hear the Bedtime Story. But she then gets off the sofa and wanders over to a toybox in the far corner of the room from the TV, where I follow her with the camera as she picks out the Sindy doll and examines her, while the CBeebies continuity link continues. Suddenly a voice, familiar to me but new, and evidently striking, to Connie, says

“Hallo!” Connie looks up instantly and I exclaim “Oh, it’s David Tennant reading the story!”

Connie walks purposefully back towards the TV, throwing Cindy aside and seizing the stool to push it right up to the TV, climbs up to adopt the preferred kneeling position with her face close to the screen (Figure 3.14). I doubt that she can follow much if any of the story, but she is certainly attracted by Tennant’s voice, which differs from those of most children’s programme presenters in its lack of “child-directed” pitch and phrasing. As Figure 3.14 shows, she focuses intently on Tennant’s face when he is on the screen, but also gently touches the images of the toys shown scattered about the set, and the illustrations from the story as they appeared –

looking especially, again, at the faces. The Bedtime Story uses rostrum camerawork⁸ of the story book pictures, rather than animation, but this still means that the images change before Connie expects them to, and she seems intrigued by the challenge of trying to keep her finger or her gaze on objects that moved about the screen but are not animated. She maintains her attention for nearly four minutes, so much so that she fails to hear Phoebe coming back into the room, but when she finally does notice this, her attention becomes divided and soon she leaves the screen to join Phoebe on the sofa.

Figure 3.14: Connie meets David Tennant: ITNG4 (aged 1;11)

I had thought that ITNG was going to be a major theme of my research: with this in mind I had negotiated with Ragdoll Productions for a visit to their studios in Stratford-on-Avon to meet with their researcher, Annette Cunningham, to discuss the programme and to watch some of their vast stock of videos of children watching ITNG and other programmes that they have made. This was fascinating in many ways, but revealed – unsurprisingly – that almost all their videos were made in nurseries and day care centres. The few that were made in homes are usually with childminders, and feature siblings of different ages. The videos were made “to keep in touch with our audience”: they did not undertake any longitudinal studies. Thus my fieldwork – with twins, longitudinally over 20 months, and in domestic settings familiar to the children, often with their mother present – is significantly different to Ragdoll’s. But in any case, by the time I

8 A rostrum camera is used to create moving images of a still picture.; in a sense, to “narrativize” it. The picture is placed on a platform below the camera, which can be moved in order to create an effect of scanning across the picture or of zooming slowly in and out. Thus parts of the picture can be revealed, in an order which fits the demands of the spoken and/or musical audio track.

met with Annette Cunningham on 10^th February 2012, Alfie and Connie had long abandoned watching ITNG. It had been “used up” (see Section 5.6.3).

All these close encounters with the screen reveal that our initial anxieties about the children being “too close” to the screen were ill-founded. This was not curiosity about the technology – though this was a passing interest – but an intense desire to examine deliberately chosen sections of the programme as closely as they could. The fact that this was also intensely pleasurable became clear when they moved on to the Eric Carle films.