As a teen, when I witnessed the merciless replacement of the time-honoured classic Playbus with a foursome of babbling gibber-wits called Teletubbies, I was outraged. A cheerful, educational institution had been budged aside to make room for disturbing technicolour babble-crap and my weekday afternoons would never be the same. Even now the Y-Bird must lie gathering dust on some long forgotten shelf in a storage shed round the back of BBC television centre. What's the sign on the lollipop? The sign of the times, that's what.
A Christian ministry (read 'octogenarian village-green zealouts') once argued online that the Teletubbies represent an attempt to promote a new global paradigm of earth-centered spirituality. All I knew was that we had ventured into a terrifying new world where giggling demons with televisions in their guts rolling around under the gaze of a demented sun-fetus now amounted to kids telly.
Spin forward a decade or so. The Teletubbies, having firmly cemented their place in history as both new-wave educators and soulless harbingers of a faceless armageddon, have retired happy in the knowledge that children no longer have time for wasteful things like numbers, sentences or compassion thereby making them ideal pawns for the eventual war on humanity.
In their cultural wake arrived their inevitable successor, from the same production company, In The Night Garden. Continuing the tradition of sun-dappled nonsense, the 'night garden' (where it is ironically never bloody dark as far as I can tell) is home to a myriad strange and bizarre inhabitants all, as far as I can tell, named after thinly-veiled racial slurs.
Iggle-Piggle
Iggle-Piggle is clearly king of the garden and as such gallops around the lunatic landscape like Lord Bastard of Shittington Manor content in the knowledge that his smug face adorns all the mortifyingly over-priced tie-in merchandise touted toward the well-meaning, sleep-deprived zombies that look after their target audience. He routinely can't be bothered to go to bed and is a force of chaos in the garden.
The Tombliboos
The Tombliboos are three excitable, unblinking novelty pen-toppers that live in a giant green microphone. Their day mainly comprises bumping into each other and laughing. Major dramas have included all three of them simultaneously forgetting where they put their trousers and getting lost in their own house, all of which puts them on par with cocaine-addled university students.
Makka-Pakka
Makka-Pakka is the meekest of the garden's inhabitants and the others have spotted this and have made him their bitch. Forced to live underground in a pitiful ditch hovel, he spends his time doing 'favours' for the other residents such as finding all the shit they've lost whilst in a giddy haze and washing their faces. He travels the garden with a push trolley collecting rocks (which he sleeps with for comfort) quietly wittering to himself like a homeless man with dementia. How do his friends repay this quiet, selfless being? On one occassion his trolley ran away on it's own and The Pontipines stopped it. With a rock. What a bunch of cunts.
The Pontipines/The Wattingers
The Pontipines are a huge family of miniscule wooden people who all live squashed into a tiny house like refugees. They are rarely seperated and travel everywhere in a conga-line. Likewise, their next-door neighbours are an unnervingly identical family called The Wattingers, who are indistinguishable from The Pontipines except for the fact they are blue instead of red. The whole lot of them are pathologically flatulent and at times even appear to replace their squeaky language with a series of rasping guffs.
Upsy-Daisy
Upsy-Daisy is the sole female inhabitant of the garden, save for the mostly sexless Pontipine/Wattinger wives. In what appears to be a staunchly patriarchal society, Upsy-Daisy is not permitted her own house and instead is forced to keep her bed in the middle of the garden. She spends her day singing nonsense and spinning in circles.
The Ninky Nonk & The Pinky Ponk
The Night Garden is home to two sentient vehicles which appear at random to ferry the garden's inhabitants between nowhere and somewhere else, seemingly ignorant of their huge size difference. The Ninky Nonk is a hobbled-together gypsy caravan convoy that pelts around at breakneck speed which is in stark contrast to the Pinky Ponk, a farting airship that travels painfull slowly and is still incapable of avoiding trees. When the Pinky Ponk collides with a tree it is referred to as a 'ponk' which is far cuter than 'unnecessary and terrifying crash'.
The Haahoos
The Haahoos occupy a biological space somewhere between sentient foam gods and garden furniture. They are massive gurning shapes that loom through the garden and are in all respects the stuff of fucking nightmares.
The Tittifers
Just birds. They painted them pretty colours but they're just heavily stage managed parrots.
The surprising thing amongst all of this is that I actually love In The Night Garden. I really do. Why? because I have a 14 month old son and it doesn't matter what wacky shenanigans he's in the middle of (climbing the radiators, investigating plug sockets), when In The Night Garden comes on he walks calmly to the sofa and is quietly entranced by this tomfoolery for a solid 25 minutes. Any other parents will attest that discoveries like this are rare. Disturbingly, therein lies its devillish power. It speaks directly to the ludicrously nonsensical child-mind at a level we mere adults can never understand and as a result I, like my own child, am powerless to resist.
