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Prolific children’s producer to depart Endemol

After 25 years of producing a string of Live Action Kid's TV, Noel Price moves towards online content, blaming funding challenges.

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Prolific children’s television producer Noel Price will depart Endemol Australia, to create online content aimed primarily at teens and young adults under 25.

Price has been producing children’s television for 25 years, the last 17 with with Endemol and its predecessor Southern Star Entertainment.

His credits include Blue Water High, Hairy Legs, In Your Dreams, Tracey McBean, a gURLs wURLd, Classic Tales, Bottle Top Bill,The Sleepover Club, Raggs, Foreign Exchange, Snobs, Outriders, Spellbinder and The Girl From Tomorrow.

Price told IF funding models had collapsed in Children’s TV with licence fees from broadcasters static or falling, and young viewers having shifted to watching content online.

“Networks aren’t paying the licence fees they used to and kids are watching stuff online and on mobile devices and less and less on TV,” he said.

“Also, there is a tsunami of animation being produced globally, most of it subsidised and unprofitable.”

Price is widely regarded for his contribution to Children’s TV. Only last year he told TV Tonight, “Australia’s biggest cultural export is actually Children’s Television. It’s huge and it has been for decades. The audiences around the world are massive. They swamp anything that adult drama and feature film combined can put together,” he says.

“It’s fair to say (Australia is) one of the major players in providing children’s drama. It’s an untold story but it’s a big story. The influence we wield internationally is beyond what anybody really understands.”

Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation, told IF, “Noel Price has been a fixture in the Australian children’s television industry for decades, and literally millions of kids around the world would have seen his shows. His comments about the current challenges financing children’s drama are spot on. And frankly, if Noel can’t do it, nobody can.”

His final production In Your Dreams (pictured), a co-production with NDR and TVPlus in Germany, premieres on 7TWO on June 15.

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