John Craven's Newsround/Newsround

JOHN CRAVEN'S NEWSROUND/NEWSROUND
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1972-present day

The frantic xylophone and percussion intro, like an urgent news flash, fooled you into believing that this was a serious news programme. And it was clear that John Craven wanted it to be a credible, ground-breaking programme, bringing up-to-the-minute news to children in a way that was accessible to them. But unlike most starch-shirted BBC news presenters, Craven would sit there in his thick-knit, patterned jumper, bringing us such earth-shattering news as the plight of a pair of pandas in London Zoo, or the longest domino-rally in the world, or maybe even a man who’s invented a house on wheels. Even when I was six, I knew these couldn’t be the most pressing matters of the day; they couldn’t be what the grown-ups were reading about in their big newspapers. To be fair to Newsround, they did bring us some very memorable and saddening reports about the famines in Ethiopia, but they always seemed overly-concerned about the endangered habitat of the koala, or explaining to us what CFCs stood for, for the millionth time. As we entered the mid 1980s, the title was shortened to just Newsround, and Craven was joined by future BBC sports’ presenter Helen Rollason (who sadly died of cancer in August 1999), and Roger Finn, who was quite dishy in a non-threatening way. Since then, there have been a list of mainly homogenous presenters, with an average age of 17; the promising ones go on to mainstream BBC news, and the others find jobs on Animal Hospital or somewhere not too taxing.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 5/10

(Thanks to www.londonist.com for the borrowed pic)