There are insights of interest and value to all in these pages. This book develops a fresh and insightful approach to the questions of children and television. Drawing on recent work in linguistics and semiotics, Hodge and Tripp analyse the rich and ambiguous messages of television and cartoons and examine the ways in which these messages are interpreted by children. The authors convincingly show that children are sophisticated viewers: they have a shrewd sense of fact and fantasy and are active interpreters of plot.