Children’s TV, once the pride of state TV, has almost completely disappeared, thus losing a cultural and professional training ground useful above all to families and very young people who found a responsible and reliable playmate on Italian TV, both private and public. For those who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, children’s TV was not a blurry memory, but a solid, daily, shared event. There was no child in Italy who didn’t know that at 2pm on Rai 2 there would be Fabrizio Frizzi with Tandem. That time of day was not a filler, but the heart of a collective imagination. The schedules actually opened up to young spectators, granting them a centrality that seems unthinkable today.

Even before discovering color TV, Rai began its broadcasts at 5pm with the strip called the children’s TV. There were English lessons, DIY lessons, cartoons, dramas like Saturnino Farandola, Scaramacai, Treasure Island, Around the world in 90 days. Even foreign productions were always very attentive and respectful of their audiences: many grew up with the kids from The blue seagull or with those of the Via Pal. And again Lassie, Fury, Rin Tin Tin, Poly. Among the historical faces of children’s TV in the Seventies are presenters who accompanied the afternoons of many generations. Renato Rascel became very popular among younger audiences by hosting the children’s program Cartoon stories in the early 1970s. And then from Cino Tortorella to Ettore Andenna, from Febo Conti to the great Corrado. To then get to Paolo Bonolis, Carlo Conti and the great Fabrizio Frizzi who trained in Tandem to those dimensions of empathy that made him one of the faces most loved by Italians.

Marco Bellavia, historical face for many years of Bim Boom Bamsummarizes this human marriage of Italian TV with lucidity: “All the greatest Italian TV hosts have passed through children’s TV. All the older ones did something for children by teaching and learning. It was a gym where you showed up without armor. If you made a mistake, the children’s audience noticed. If you were fake, they didn’t follow you. It was a school of truth.”

Manuela Blanchard – three Telegattis for best children’s program – remembers that period with emotion and nostalgia: “It was beautiful and fun, instructive and extremely profitable not only from an economic point of view but also from an emotional and emotional point of view”. And now? “And now there is nothing – says Manuela – children’s TV requires attention, quality and consequently costs money. Some presenters fear being too recognizable in this segment and perhaps remaining prisoners of it. But it is a false problem. The truth is that our TV was truly a reliable and responsible babysitter. Today children spend hours scrolling videos on TikTok. And when I see a kid who in front of a printed photo tries to scroll it as if it were a jpg, I feel bad. TV today doesn’t offers the same guarantees as then. And social media is infinitely worse.”

That pact between TV and childhood was interrupted almost without us realizing it. The afternoon of generalists is now dominated by talk, crime news, competitive infotainment: we discuss, we argue, we create permanent debates, but without building visions or communities. TV has stopped targeting children, with the mistaken idea that they now “are elsewhere”. And so he lost them twice: he ignored them when they were present and continues to chase them in digital worlds without a strategy. While making a market for their advertisers.

Nunzia De Girolamo, who watched that TV as a child and today observes its absence, touches on a painful point: “I hope that this vulnus will soon be healed, because I grew up with Bim Boom Bam and they were healthy values. Let’s hope that those who produce TV will soon understand that today’s children are the true citizens of tomorrow. That’s where we need to invest, we’re all already old.”

A TV that doesn’t speak to children doesn’t decline the future

According to the latest Agcom research on the audiovisual consumption of minors, children between 4 and 14 years old watch YouTube much longer than TV and spend over three hours a day in front of personal screens. The solitary vision grows, the one shared within the family diminishes. This changes the grammar of the story: no longer fixed appointments but short clips, instant formats and horizons dictated by the algorithm.

There’s no point in pretending that nothing has changed. Children watch content on their personal screen when they decide, no longer when a program schedule suggests it. It is a cultural revolution rather than a technological one: children’s time is no longer synchronized. Marco Bellavia photographs the moment with a disarming frankness: “Once upon a time we were the ones who directly controlled and taught something to the young audience. Now the Chinese of TikTok do it, foreigners do it. And it’s a shame. Times have changed. For the worse”. And it’s true. But that’s not necessarily the end of that educational mission. It is rather a call to reinvent ourselves. If TV still wants to speak to children, it must stop waiting for them in front of the screen and must go back to building worlds that follow children where they live their daily lives today: platforms, social media, short content. But with the narrative and pedagogical care that the public service has forgotten to provide.

What have we really lost

When the kids’ TV disappeared, it wasn’t just a few programs that disappeared. A way of forming talent and character has disappeared. Those programs were built by teams of authors who could experiment, try, take risks. A sketch that didn’t work wasn’t a drama: it was a step forward. In the studio you could breathe craftsmanship and passion. The young presenters learned empathy, management of emotions, the responsibility of addressing a concrete audience, made up of class, recess, afternoons at home and homework. The puppets, cartoons, columns on sports or animals were not “easy content”, but tools for tackling serious topics with the right lightness. Bellavia reminds us of another truth that risks being missed: “The series with Cristina, with Licia were the first true Italian fiction. In their naivety they were funny, and they still are today. They taught the very young with tact and attention the dialectic of affection and first love. But in those stories there was already all the ABCs of modern fiction: recognizable characters, narrative arcs, music, merchandising. It was a cultural industry well before we realized it.”

A new gym is possible

Reconstructing children’s TV does not mean reproducing a museum from the 1980s. There’s no point in going back to the puppets of the past or pretending that children don’t have an endless digital universe at their disposal. Putting children’s TV back at the center means recognizing that the little ones are full cultural and social citizens. It means creating recognizable appointments that give rhythm to their day, even in an “on demand” context. It means combining linear TV with a protected digital ecosystem, with connected content, in which children can continue to explore and participate. Maybe it could also mean going back to using TV as a professional training tool for presenters who don’t necessarily want to be content creators on the 9:16 schedule. Every time children’s TV produced a new face, the system gained a future host, an actor, an author. Without that gym, we grow through imitation and no longer through experience. The public service has the obligation and at the same time the great opportunity to start again: investing in authors, choosing young faces, building new formats that combine play, reality and learning.

Reconstructing the imagination

Before closing this reasoning, it is also worth reporting the perspective of those who wrote and built those programs. The voices of the authors remind us that children’s TV was a work of pure daily invention, of fast writing and concrete affection towards the most demanding and vulnerable audience. A writing that today could find new strength if put in the hands of young professionals, ready to dialogue with the languages ​​of the present without losing the key principle: speaking with children, never above them. Nostalgia serves to remember, but it cannot replace a project. Children’s TV will never return if television doesn’t really want it. Because if it is true that children today have everything, it is equally true that they risk not having someone to accompany them in understanding what to choose and why to do it. Let’s be clear. Parents don’t seem to do that anymore either. In this sense, TV, especially in Rai, has the duty to regain possession of that public service role that has now been definitively lost. The promise of that gym wasn’t just entertainment, it was cultural citizenship. Restoring that space does not mean turning the Eighties into a museum, but recognizing that behind every child sitting on the sofa there is not a volatile consumer, but a person who will study, work, vote and lead this country tomorrow. The real question today is simple and full of consequences. Does Rai, which still defines itself as a public service, want to return to being the home of the little ones and a training ground for the talents of tomorrow? If the answer is yes, we won’t need cheap nostalgia but choices: budget, new faces, courageous ideas and constant editorial commitment. Children’s TV could return, if we accept that the imagination does not arise by itself. It must be cultivated, nourished, trained. Just like it was done on that TV which for years taught entire generations to look at reality with more curious eyes and, perhaps, even a little happier and less stressed, anxious or in need of psychological assistance.