Creating Teletubbies

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s 1994 and the BBC is looking for a brand-new children’s TV series. TV producer Anne Wood decides she’s going to make a show aimed at an audience that’s never had programmes made for it before – two and three-year-olds. She tells Melanie Stewart-Smith the fascinating story of how spacemen and technology inspired the creation of one of the most popular kids TV shows of all time, Teletubbies. (Photo: Teletubbies. Credit: Ragdoll Productions for the BBC/Wildbrain)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Melanie
0:10.7	Stuart Smith. I'm taking you back to 1997 when the first episode of the children's TV show
0:17.6	Telly Tuppies aired on the BBC in the UK. Those four colourful characters with TV screens
0:31.7	in their bellies and antennas on their heads gripped not only children in the UK but eventually
0:37.6	children around the world. It just escalated, you know, at a pace that you wouldn't normally get
0:43.7	in television. We could have gone making it to this day. Oh, imagine. That's Anwood, she created
0:50.7	the Telly Tuppies. You're going to hear how technology, spacemen and even pigs played a vital
0:57.1	role in their story. But first, let's go back to 1994. The BBC are planning to end their current
1:04.4	flagship children's programme called Play Days. It was a colourful show aimed at four to seven
1:12.1	year olds with human presenters. Anne was already making some of the UK's biggest kids' TV shows
1:19.1	like Rosie and Jim for ITV. She decided to pitch for the BBC slot, but she was going to do something
1:28.0	radical and aimed the programme at a much younger audience two and three year olds. When we were doing
1:34.6	our previous work, one of the things that we noticed was that very young children were watching
1:40.4	television, but actually were not necessarily keeping up with what they saw there. So it was
1:48.1	controversial to actually consider making programme for two and three year olds. And at the time
1:56.3	we were beginning to develop Telly Tuppies, you could actually go into situations with young children
2:03.2	and observe them watching. I did years and years and years of it because I was really interested
2:08.9	in it. And so Telly Tuppies came through a lot of observation and it was very much tied in with
2:16.5	new technology. And it's new developments that played a key part in how Anne came up with The Telly
2:21.6	Tuppies. Inspiration hit when she was working with a colleague who was a writer and puppeteer.
2:27.8	It happened that Andy Davenport and I went on a selling trip to the States and we went to
2:33.6	Washington and we decided to go and look in the Smithsonian at the spacesuits that they'd worn
	...

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