01 August 2018 by Christina Barker
Photo credit - BBC
For those of you with young children, you will know what 'Biggleton' is. For those that are unfamiliar with the word, I shall enlighten you. Biggleton is a children's television series which has been broadcasting for the past few months on BBC - CBeebies. In short, it's a children's series which shows live action from 5-7-year-olds in an imaginary town pretending to be grown-ups. They have exciting adventures as they pretend to do the jobs around the town. They all have a particular role to play and are great little actors and actresses. One is a police officer, another a florist, there's a firefighter, a shopkeeper, a postman, a vet and a business lady. I'm sure there are a few others too.
As a mother to two young children (6 and 2 years), CBeebies is on prior to the school runs and Biggleton is on air just before we leave for the day. Most of the time, I am not paying too much attention to what happens in the programmes as I am too busy making sure the children have been fed and are ready for the day ahead. Recently, however, I stopped to watch some of it and took note of the pure diversity this show has. I was very impressed by how they have managed to show such a different variety of children. It's refreshing to see that not all the children are White British. This spreads a positive message to the children of today that are watching the show. Many children these days are living in Britain that have come from overseas originally, or their family have in the past. Sometimes their parents have to work in the UK or have been born here and so their children have to attend school here. They go to school worried that they will be 'the odd one out' but as time has gone on, this is now not the case and we, in fact, have more children that are not White British. It seems to have taken a while for the same thing to happen on our television shows. Young children and even adults could not relate to the shows as there was no one on screen who looked remotely like them. This feeling of being alone and possibly in a different country or place they do not understand has taken its toll on these people over the years and we have had to fight to get people of different race and religions on our television channels and magazines.
Even disabled people have it difficult. Every child wishes to be accepted and understood and if they aren't seeing other people they can familiarise themselves with then they tend to cut themselves off from the world and that can get very lonely.
Well done Biggleton for showing the way and helping the young children of today see a world they can relate to. I'm certain this will encourage them to have a more positive life and interact with other children of different race and religions. They should be able to accept each other much easier too.
We at Snowflake Books love to hear stories that help bring the world together in a more positive way. Our books show meaning and teach children how to link both English and Mandarin together. They may have a friend in school that they can sit with and read one of our books to each other. We hope to hear more of this type of news in the future and raise awareness with our books.
Check out the short clip below which advertises the series. The show airs each weekday morning at 8:20 am. You can also watch the show on the BBC website or on catch-up at Biggleton - CBeebies.
