THE British psychologist Tony Charlton visits the island of St Helena as part of a seven year study of the effects of television on its school age population. He knows that he will find it largely unchanged.

The island where Napoleon died in exile in 1821 is home to a peaceful community of some 6,000 people. A far flung British colony 1,000 miles from the West African coast, with a wide ethnic mix, St Helena is a beautiful place of mountains and clear seas, where at weekends most people join in the community dances to the ubiquitous country and western music and children roam where they like.

It is reached only by the Royal Mail Ship which calls there once every six weeks on its way between Cardiff and Cape Town. The only change on St Helena these days is that for the last 18 months almost every home on the island has had a television set to receive direct broadcasts by satellite.

In March 1995, the American news network CNN was the first to be beamed to the island. Since June of this year the islanders have also received the diverse programmes and soap operas of the South African channel M-Net; next year they will have a third channel, BBC television's world service.

"Life there is tranquil, quaint, a bit like rural Britain in the 1930s," Tony Charlton, who is professor of Behaviour Studies at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, told an international conference on children and the media in northern Italy recently. It is, he added, a particularly favourable environment for children. "The nuclear and extended family have remained intact."

Tony Charlton's research into children's behaviour at the island's schools before the arrival of television found that they spent far more of their school time doing the work the teachers set them than do children in Britain or the US: more than 90 per cent, compared with around 60 per cent elsewhere.

In anticipation of the arrival of television, a team of researchers unobtrusively took many hours of video footage of children playing in the playground to see whether their behaviour will alter under the effects of TV viewing. They asked teachers about their pupils' behaviour in the classroom, and the children themselves about how they expected television to change their lives. They are also monitoring changes in concentration levels and time devoted to homework.

Tony Charlton will not have detailed results about the impact of television until later this month. But he said first indications were that there was no evidence that the children's social behaviour had deteriorated. "In fact there are tentative indications that children are behaving better now than before. Families are tending to view together so that parents can exercise some control over what their children watch and discuss issues with them."

But the few previous studies undertaken of children in societies before and after the arrival of television have been more pessimistic. Two early ones in North America found that incidences of violent behaviour in the playground doubled after the arrival of television into a community. And as one American researcher noted, television quickly became "a plug in drug", used by parents as a babysitter.

EARLY patterns of families viewing together changed to increasing isolation as American homes acquired multiple television sets. Recent research by the American Psychological Association shows that in North America children now spend an average of only two minutes a day interacting with their parents. At the same time children are spending far longer in front of the TV set. A recent study in Britain found that children viewed for an average of three hours a day on weekdays, rising to six hours at weekends - more time than they spend in school.

But St Helena may be a special case. Its remoteness has ensured that it is a closely knit community where people look after each other. Tony Charlton talks about it with great affection.

"It's the only place I've ever been to that I would like to be part of," he said. "I'm convinced that the family is central in helping children to maximise good effects of television viewing. And I think schools also have a critical role."