Anne Wood

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2011

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the children's TV producer Anne Wood.

Her creations - which include Teletubbies, Rosie and Jim and In the Night Garden - have delighted millions of children around the world. She says she is driven by her fascination with children's creative development - and was horrified by the critical response when Teletubbies was first screened. "I wanted to make a programme that had love in it," she says, "You'd have thought I'd started World War Three the response that happened - it's innocent fun, that's all it is."

Producer: Leanne Buckle.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My My cast away this week is the TV producer Anne Wood, the creator of Tele Tubby
0:38.9	's Rosie and Jim and In the Night Garden. Growing up in a mining town in the northeast, there were scant children's
0:45.3	books and no money to pay for them. She became a teacher and an early champion of children's
0:50.7	literature. She says she's always had a knack for knowing what a
0:54.4	three-year-old wants and has made big business out of tiny tots, creating candy-colored
0:59.3	worlds full of sunshine and soothing landscapes, populated by spongy characters that exchange gobbledygook
1:05.3	greetings and chubby cuddles. It's a world away from the harsh insecurity that she has faced
1:10.2	as a businesswoman. Early on, she put the family home up as collateral and then
1:14.5	watched as TV companies made themselves millions from her ideas. No such problems
1:20.0	these days. I felt I was being ripped off, she says. I started to go on business
1:24.5	courses. I'm not going to be patronized whilst they take all the money.
1:28.2	Reputedly then, Anne would total global Tele-Tubby's related sales have topped a billion dollars I read am I right?
1:36.4	To be honest I couldn't tell you I don't really know.
1:39.8	It's possible that they have.
1:41.8	My interest is really with how will a three-year-old view
1:45.3	what I'm making, but it's very satisfying that it's making money because if it
1:50.0	wasn't we wouldn't be able to do the work so one feeds the other. You've said
1:54.5	that of TeleTubby's it was an overnight success based on 35 years of
1:58.9	experience. That's true and I think most overnight successes are based on a lot of
	...

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