CARTOON is trying to rectify this imbalance but in the international market, where business rather than program making drives the decisions, supply and demand is either determined by genuine children's preferences, or overdetermined by marketing and promotional hype. Either way, no amount of dumping of unwanted or unsupported product in the marketplace will affect the patterns of purchase.

64 Zoo Lane: A Case Study
CARTOON's projectionist policies, then, only go so far. At some point, the product has to go it alone in the open market. In this tough place there are many other agendas and different kinds of politics. In the UK at the moment the situation is unusually fraught and my own project, 64 Zoo Lane, is caught up in it. 64 Zoo Lane is a series for younger children created by the award-winning director of Little Wolf, An Vrombaut. An brought the project to me back in 1993 and together we set about developing it for television as a 13 x 11 minute series. We made a successful application for CARTOON preproduction aid and received 40,000 ECUs to make a pilot. The project was the smash hit of the 1994 Forum in the Azores and, as a result, we were able to put together a financial partnership quickly and painlessly. So far, thanks to CARTOON's support, so good. But the production go ahead has to wait for a commission in the UK.

The Village, winner of the Cartoon D'Or in 1993, directed by Mark Baker.

First Catch Your Commission ...
The 1992 Broadcasting Act established the ITV Network Centre, the commissioning organization for the whole of the private sector terrestrial broadcast operation in the UK. The new structure was created by the current Tory administration whose agenda was, and always has been, intensely political. No program can be either commissioned or acquired for the network except through the Network Centre. The commission price is a license fee for which ITV acquires the right to broadcast the program a certain number of times over a certain number of years, but the Centre is financed from a levy on the individual ITV companies and is not in itself a profit-making organization. It is simply a scheduler whose job it is to deliver programs destined to rate well on the network. Ironically, its distance from the real business of television, a deliberate Tory ploy, is now hurting the small production companies, a sector which the same Tory administration has always fervently encouraged.

64 Zoo Lane was offered to the Network Centre in November 1995 and to date we have heard no news, except that it is on a shortlist, the same shortlist where many other good projects have been languishing, some of them for up to two years. The Network Centre, untouched by the need to earn money, is indifferent to the business needs of its clients. We are fortunate in our partners--they have all maintained the same passionate confidence in our project as ourselves and we are certain that 64 Zoo Lane will be made. But CARTOON can do no more than they have already done. Their benevolent protection was enough to help us push our project out into the world where, let's face it, it may eventually join a European pilot mountain along with butter, milk and the odd seasonal vegetable. I hope not ...

Jill McGreal owns and runs her own Londonbased animation production company, CODENAME The Animation Agency. She produces television series for children and represents many wellknown international directors for commercial work. She continues to write and teach about animation and film in general.