DAWN Airey, network controller of children’s television at ITV, likes her job. It was, she told a Sunday paper, the best thing she could do with her clothes on.

She also remarked that she thought children should come home from school, put their feet on the table, stuff their faces with crisps and relax for an hour or two. In a stroke, she confirmed what all right-thinking parents had always suspected about children’s TV bosses: that all they want to do is turn their kids into couch potatoes and stuff their heads with the audiovisual equivalent of junk food.

Dawn, 33, is unamused. She says so in her head girl manner, as she sits with fresh-scrubbed face, specs, school neat hair, plain skirt and natural tights in her ITV office with its animation posters on the walls and soft toys on the window ledge. She says she’s been misrepresented, quoted out of context, and has fired off a letter to the offending newspaper. So let’s do some detective work, children, and find out who Dawn really is. A passing resemblance to a Woodentops character – from a recent photograph in which she grins with Pinocchio-style inanity – may be cruelly noted.

But with which children’s TV character does she most identify? ‘Oh good grief,’ she replies. (Her vocabulary is very jolly hockey sticks.) ‘My favourite animation series is Scooby Doo. But I don’t want to be that dog. ‘I know!’ she exclaims suddenly. ‘I’d like to be one of the wolves in Wolf It! They’re mad as hatters but enormous fun.’ True to form, Dawn then agrees gamely to be photographed with her head poking through the office foliage, alongside a variety of soft animals.

She has been at ITV Network Centre since March. Before that she played career hopscotch. She started as a management trainee at Central in 1985, hopped to Channel 4 liaison officer, researcher at Central, associate producer on Classmates (‘a kind of This is Your Life putting stars like Ian Botham or Lord Lichfield with their schoolmates who make cringeworthy comments. Some people’s worst nightmare’) and planner at Central before landing her current position.

She says all this in a PR-ish sort of way; she’s got the hang of presenting herself positively. Very grown up.

Now she commissions 1,000 hours of television a year and schedules and acquires programmes for the networked daytime and children’s slots. Her programmes kick off at ‘oh nine twenty five’ with quizzes, followed by This Morning with Richard and Judy, two factual pieces in the afternoon, then the children’s schedule. She enjoys her own output. ‘I wouldn’t commission it otherwise.’

Her route into television would make a whizzy series. She is a lass from Preston who was schooled privately and comprehensively, then worked in a bank during the day, a pub in the evening and with a vet at the weekend (‘holding down animals to be injected and so forth’ – at the vet’s, not the pub). She saved her pocket money to travel for 15 months in India, Africa and Europe and work in a kibbutz, then went to Cambridge where she read geography, gaining a 2:1. Her hobbies are map-collecting, tennis, cats, food, wine and work. She is a light TV viewer, ‘just 10 hours a week’. Dawn spends three nights a week in London with old Cambridge friends, whose two-year-old she uses for market research; otherwise she lives near Oxford with her ‘de facto partner of 13 years’. Her what? ‘Well, it means your formal partner when you’re not married.’

Ah! Her common-law husband or lover? ‘Well, boyfriend sounds crass and teenaged.’ Anyway, he’s called Martin and works in PR and they’re not going to marry. ‘It’s not on my agenda at the moment.’ (Life as a career move.) Nor are they going to produce target audiences. ‘We don’t want to have children. We’re both so wrapped up in our careers that we’d make lousy parents,’ she says. ‘I’m so busy meeting the televisual delights of children during the day that to come home to children in the evening would be too much.’ She hopes Martin will give her a Nintendo for Christmas. ‘I’d like to play Sonic the Hedgehog.’

So back to television. Parents can hold the poison-pen letters: Dawn is keen on a balanced diet and believes that children cannot live on crisps alone. ‘In terms of televisual delights children want good stories, action, adventure and quality programming. They’re not hugely different from adults.’ She was weaned on Camberwick Green, the Woodentops, Magic Roundabout and Jackanory, but, unlike the rest of her generation, doesn’t think that their modern successors are weak and depraved by comparison. ‘Children’s audiences,’ she avows, ‘are now as well served or better.’ HER offerings to a mass market are Woof! (Emmy award-winning drama), Children’s Ward (ITV’s most popular drama, about the young patients and staff in an inner-city hospital) and The Tomorrow People (sci-fi series about children with special powers).

She doesn’t yet have a character as popular as that pink cultural icon Mr Blobby in Noel’s House Party. ‘We’ve got Rupert Bear, and Bungle, Zippy and George from Rainbow.’ None looks likely to make number one in the charts or edit The Sun, but she’s working on it.

She has to deliver the ratings (‘we’re a commercial channel, not a philanthropic one’) and naturally wants a majority share of the audience: ‘At the moment we’re getting 54 per cent.’ The fight for zapper-happy kids is a tough one, but she acts responsibly. ‘We’re acting in loco parentis. We take seriously our responsibility to inform, educate and entertain.’ Critics wonder how serious she is. They fear her ruthless pursuit of audiences will mean less information and education and more soaps and cartoons. ‘They’re mistaken. We have more educational programmes than ever before,’ she counters. ‘At the expense of entertainment.’ She doesn’t see her programming going the American way of wall-to-wall animation. So what will her end-of-term report say? ‘Very promising start. Should do well – as long as she cuts down on the crisps.

PISTOLS AIMED AT DAWN: ITV’S CHALLENGERS NICK WILSON, Director of Programmes, The Children’s Channel. Age: 44.

Family background: father was a publican (ex-RAF); mother, now a retired publican.

Marital status: married, with three girls and one boy.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Do children watch too many cartoons? Not mine!’

On The Great Crisps Issue: ‘Do children eat too many many crisps? Not as many as me! I love crisps, especially Kettle Chips I curl up and watch TV with them!’

ANNA HOME, Director of Children’s Programmes, BBC TV.

Age: 55.

Family background: won’t say.

Marital status: single.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: disapproves of the United States which offers ‘mainly wall-to-wall cartoons of the kind which we would, on the whole, not buy’. She does acknowledge that cartoons are important for children’s television but insists that she buys ‘only the best’.

On The Great Crisps Issue: won’t say.

JAMES BAKER, Director of Programmes, Nickelodeon.

Age: 29.

Family background: father is the ex-newsreader Richard Baker. Mother, he says, has devoted her life to ‘bringing up two media pansies’ (brother Andrew writes for The Independent on Sunday).

Marital status: going out with BBC journalist Anastasia Cooke. No kids. On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Kids are very good at picking and choosing what they want to see. Cartoons aren’t the be-all and end-all, but a good script works equally for adults and kids. Kids like so-called adult programmes too.

“They’ll enjoy the visuals in Blackadder or Absolutely Fabulous just as adults like the verbals.’