From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and has been a visiting fellow at universities in the UK, the US, Norway, and Sweden. Her work has appeared in Media History; Journal of Children and Media; Media, Culture & Society; Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth; The Programming Historian, and elsewhere. She holds a shared directorship at the Center for Digital History Aarhus. She lives in Åbyhøj, Denmark, and her favorite time is spent cooking, reading, and playing video games with her family.
Jensen applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sesame Street: A Transnational History, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Sesame Street: A Transnational History is located in the first part of a chapter about Sesame Street’s way to the United Kingdom. In the chapter, we hear about the Children’s Television Workshop, the company behind Sesame Street, and its trouble getting the show on air in Britain in the early 1970s. The page starts when the Workshop discovers that the BBC will not buy Sesame Street and what it did next:Follow Helle Strandgaard Jensen on Twitter.Not having success with the BBC, the Workshop turned to the commercial network, Independent Television (ITV). The Workshop already had a connection at the Independent Television Authority (ITA), the institution overseeing ITV. The ITA’s Brian Young had seen Sesame Street in October 1969 on a visit to the Workshop in New York. Another ITA employee saw Sesame Street at Prix Jeunesse, after which he talked to and later corresponded with Edward Palmer, leading to a number of screenings of Sesame Street for ITV producers and advisers throughout the autumn of 1970. Then in November 1970, Young had dinner with Cooney [the Workshop’s president] and told her of ITA’s interest in Sesame Street, but also briefed her on the problems the Workshop would be facing because of ITV’s quotas on foreign material.The page’s next two paragraphs analyze the negotiations between the Workshop and the ITV. The paragraphs are, to some extent, telling what is in the rest of the book, as they demonstrate how the transfer of Sesame Street to Europe cannot be boiled down to ‘just because it was a great show which everyone loved,’ but depended on an aggressive sales strategy and personal connections. The paragraphs also show how financial, regulatory, and cultural factors in local markets were important to the show’s local success and how the Workshop tried to navigate these. There are many details, which is indicative of how I have laid bare the inner workings of cultural transfer:As part of the ITA’s Schools Committee, Young had been involved with informal discussions about Sesame Street, which had begun as it was becoming increasingly likely that one or more of ITV’s companies would wish to buy the program. For years, committee members had wished to see an ITV contribution to the preschool field. Young might have told Cooney that the committee was much divided in its opinions about Sesame Street, and was especially conflicted over its explicit educational goals, the emphasis on facts, and its overall educational approach which some of its members feared would be too different from the progressive British approach to preschool education. Some members were, however, most positive toward the show.The last paragraph on page 99 shows how local broadcasters were pressured by the Workshop’s aggressive business strategy. At the BBC, it was the head of the children’s department, Monica Sims, who fought to keep BBC’s own preschool programs on air instead of replacing them with Sesame Street:
Given the ITA’s internal disagreements about Sesame Street, the Schools Committee decided that more people, including “parents, children and educationalists,” should see the program and form their own opinions. The ITA therefore allowed a trial screening. This gambit may have been to win over the public with the program’s appealing mixture of Muppets and popular music and thus persuade British television executives to ignore the objections of progressive educational experts. The news about the ITA’s trial screening of Sesame Street led to a renewed interest in the program from the British press. On December 7, 1970, the BBC current affairs program Late Night Line Up devoted a segment to a comparison of British and American educational techniques, and Sesame Street was taken as an example of the latter.The renewed interest in Sesame Street put pressure on Sims to defend her decision not to buy the program. She even confessed to her boss, the BBC’s director of programs, David Attenborough, that she was tired of replying to the many inquiries from the public about her reasons for not purchasing it. So when The Guardian printed an extraordinarily positive article about….All in all, the Page 99 Test works well. However, as the book is about the transfer of Sesame Street not only to the United Kingdom but the global sales strategy and its impact on the show’s transfer to Western Europe, page 99 doesn’t fully show the book’s breadth. Looking only at this page, the reader will not see how the book’s narrative alternates between global and local perspectives and between the details of cultural transfer and telling a great narrative about Sesame Street’s global success.
--Marshal Zeringue
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