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The preschool drama, Balamory, spanning 254 episodes produced 2002-5, continues to constitute a landmark commission for the Children's Department at BBC Scotland, a department that is considered a 'centre of excellence' in the BBC's 'nations and regions' structure. Balamory is alive-action, human characterbased drama in which individual episodes have complete storylines within the overarching narrative premise of on-going daily life in the fictional Scottish island of Balamory, typically centring on stories related to its nursery school. Using evidence drawn from production materials, interviews and textual analysis, this paper uses Balamory as a specific case study of how BBC Scotland negotiates the demands of both the 'nation' and the 'network' in a live-action soap opera format that was considered ground-breaking for the preschool audience. While tracing the particular success of Balamory as a landmark commission in both its production and broadcast contexts, this essay moves beyond the historical significance of the text to consider the legacy of Balamory to the BBC Scotland Children's Department several years on. It suggests reasons why the success of Balamory has not been repeated and what the future might hold for children's drama production at BBC Scotland, given the challenges facing children's public service broadcasting and specifically the role of drama therein1.
While there is occasional in-house children's production throughout the BBC nations and regions structure, Scotland is the only nation to maintain a dedicated, year-round, network children's television production facility. As such, the Children's Department at BBC Scotland ('the Department') is considered a centre of excellence, and a significant other to the main BBC Children's Department currently situated in London but scheduled to relocate to Salford by the end of 2011. This supporting role contributes to plurality of provision and suggests that the Department functions as something of an alternative voice to the metropolitan production facility, aiding diversity in representation as well as boosting non-metropolitan production quotas. Although the quotas for BBC Scotland as a whole are targetted at 8 per cent of in-house BBC production by 2016, the Department is already meeting that target in respect of in-house children's production at BBC Scotland, and indeed aspires to achieve as much as 20 per cent of BBC in-house children's production.2 It should be stressed that the Department makes only...