TELETUBBIES – "Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh!"

I have to say that in those days which we had seen, it was not unknown for us to stumble back home after an energetic night of clubbing, switch on the TV and gaze amazed at the early Sunday morning screening of Teletubbies – the BBC noticed the abnormally high ratings the programme was getting at that time before fieldwork revealed that not only tots and their parents were watching it, but also clubbers newly returned home, some (not us) still feeling Ecstatic; and the laughing baby sun, the primary colours, the nursery rhymes, the non-sequiturs and the generally disorientating sense of (non-)order in the programme made perfect sense to those coming down from the rave era.

Yet Teletubbies was about nothing if not innocence; designed specifically for 1-4 year old infants and toddlers, its gentle aim was to introduce its audience into the world by communicating with it on its own terms. Thus the camera shots which were always angled, widened and from the ground up to obviate any sense of perspective; no one really knew how big or small the white dome which housed the Teletubbies was, or the landscape in general, since they were the equivalent of toddlers, eagerly welcoming the opportunity to make (non)sense of this exciting new phenomenon called life. Pundits objected to the half-formed, largely consonant-free language which they spoke – “eh-oh” for “hello” – whereas those with direct, hands-on experience of raising very young children know that this is exactly how they communicate with others and learn to form what we know as language; similarly the persistent repetition in each episode – the films which emanated from their TV bellies were almost always shown twice, with extremely subtle differences – was criticised, but constant repetition is exactly how infants learn things, take things on, absorb things, ways of thinking, means of talking. The controversy over Tinky-Winky’s “handbag” was equally pointless and ignorant of the role playing and imitating of their forebears – and especially their mothers – in which young children naturally indulge, since this is another way of learning about how other humans live, react and interact. The Teletubbies were essentially asexual, and their behavioural patterns therefore interchangeable.

Furthermore, and absolutely crucially, the Teletubbies were never afraid of newness, or technology. Do those features – the seemingly imposing dome with its sliding doors, the periscopes which rise from the ground to issue Tannoy instructions, the paradisical living space which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, the televisions themselves, actually grafted onto the Teletubbies as an integral part of their existence – remind you of something else from thirty years previously? As children the Teletubbies see everything as new and exciting and harness the technology for their own good; it has not yet become something to be feared and hated. True, Noo-Noo the self-reliant vacuum cleaner, sometimes gets a little bossy, but that is speedily resolved by a Benny Hill-style mass chase around the premises. Whereas, at the opposite end of life, The Prisoner represents what happens when you become a tired adult, too weary to accept newness, too ready to settle for voluntary confinement; we all become imprisoned by our former technological desires. No wonder that in order to get anything out of Number 6, Leo McKern finally has to resort to regressing him to infancy; less wonder still that once free of the Village, McGoohan, McKern and Kanner all immediately start to act like children (note the Ken Kesey sidelong reference in that truck on wheels with added “Dem Bones” on primetime mainstream television), happy and boundless.

But of course Teletubbies also represents the late fulfilment of a promise from the people of 1967 to their own children; once again the idea of a happy, sunny, interdependent community which need rely only on its own innate reserves of collective goodwill. “Teletubbies Say ‘Eh-oh!” as a record also carries unmistakable auras from that year; essentially an extended version of the show’s theme tune, it is at times sufficiently disorganised to warrant valid 1967 comparison; uncredited vocalist Tim Whitnall (the show’s narrator), though sounding uncannily like Neil Tennant at the beginning with his spoken entreaties of “Time for Teletubbies!,” doesn’t even bother attempting perfect pitch – and nor do the Teletubbies themselves – when singing the “Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po” refrain; it seems as offhand as the Syd of “Apples And Oranges.” The electronic whooshes which arise from the making of “Tubby Tustard,” complete with excited squeals, are worthy of Meek; the sequence where a Fairlight sheep rendition of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” degenerates into random baaing and mooing could almost have come straight from the original SMiLE cutting room floor (“Barnyard” anyone?); and the only misplaced factor is a croaking rendition of “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” (which may or may not be Toyah) which ends in a mutter of “I’m so glad that’s finished – what a terrible racket!” and lends an unwelcome air of irony to proceedings which do not need it at all.

Most important of all, however, are the quartet’s regular cries of “Big hug!” (“Enjoy yourselves” advises the sleeve, “…and don’t forget the Big Hugs”), and if that isn’t the spirit of ’67 unspoiled I don’t know what is. Finally there is the wonderful framing device of the quiet pastoral landscape of birds and baby laughter which bookends the song, as though coming into and out of a utopian dream – this is what life could be like, if we only had the courage. If it is not untoward to invoke Thomas Traherne, the “infinite capacity of the soul at birth” sums up the ethos of Teletubbies with succinct nobility.

No.

I don’t care that the rating system doesn’t go this low.

0.

I don’t know if this is the first number one aimed specifically at toddlers. To be a bit pedantic, it’s aimed at parents of toddlers, isn’t it? Bearing in mind toddlers’ limited funds and transport.

My perspective is that Tellytubbies’ main effect was to encourage children to hug each other a lot more than they previously had. I was working in schools at this point in time and it as notable that kids – who in previous generations would never even touch one another unless it as in the context of (play)fighting – now hugged each other at the start and end of playtime as if they were long lost buxom buddies. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, just a thing.

Perhaps it wasn’t Tellytubbies that started off the touchy feely thing, I don’t know, but it certainly coincided with the phenomena. Did you hug your mates in the 1970s? I didn’t, and I didn’t know anyone who did.

The record is aimed at people with no real ability to remember anything about anything. If you want to sing along, you don’t need to remember any of the words because everything’s echoed immediately after its initial appearance. Perhaps this is a bit harsh, bearing in mind who this is aimed at, but learning the words of songs without someone constantly prompting you is basically how it worked before this, isn’t it? Repetition? Great. Absolutely. This isn’t repetition like the programme had repetition with the films, which were quite nice. This is the repetition that Johnny Rotten foresaw when he said, ‘they made you a moron’. They sure did.

There’s no dance. Just waving. Hence, I’d say, it’s not really aimed at toddlers as such as it is aimed at babies.

Babies of parents who have absolutely no ideas about how to go about entertaining their children. Babies didn’t bug their parents for the record because the target audience have no language at this point in their development. Parents bought it for their children because they couldn’t think of anything else to do with their babies, not because their babies wanted it. That’s an important difference.

This is a record that celebrates complacency. There is nothing to aspire to in this record. Children are very aware of age differences, even if they don’t understand them very well. Young kids vehemently dislike being patronised and will not hesitate to call things babyish.

Parents are the opposite. They tend to like their kids being kids and dislike seeing them grow older.

In a small zoo near our house there is a salamander kept in a state of permanent juvenility. The conditions in his tank are kept so that he cannot reach maturity. I find it quite sad in a way.

Perhaps the longer and longer period of youth that is upon us now is an effect of Tellytubbies. Kidults, all that. It’s tempting to not grow up, but if you have kids, probably you have to, even if you don’t like the idea of it.

Maybe Tellytubbies didn’t start this acceptance – and encouragement – to resist acting your age, maybe it’s symptomatic. Maybe discussing pop music at my age is hypocritical of me, bearing in mind what I’m writing here. I wouldn’t rule it out…

However, this is horrendous. Not the handbag hoo-hah, not the programme, which was okay. For babies. Not six year olds. The record is cynical and, at heart, the polar opposite of what it implies.

The inclusion promoted exists only to maximise the consumer base it aims to exploit. And exploit is exactly what it does, rather than educate or inform.

Less than zero.

If I’d become a father at the same age that my own did, this could have been my toddler children’s theme song. But I didn’t, and mine were born into the In the Night Garden era too. The Night Garden is a less manic version of the Teletubbies world, with a theme tune that’s much gentler (and kinder on parents’ ears), but I can’t help thinking that the Teletubbies capture the entire range of toddler emotions and fascinations better. That doesn’t mean I have to like this expression of them, though. Kudos to the architects of a landmark of children’s television, and I fully recognise that this single wasn’t made for me, but if I never hear it again I would consider that a gain. 2.

I found Teletubbies to be something of a phenomenon (loved or hated in seemingly equal measure) by everyone I knew, and my cousins (in their early to mid teens) got this CD and Teletubbies toys for Christmas that year.

On the record itself, I can’t help but be annoyed by the way the seventies-style BBC-brass-band-and-session-musicians charm of the actual theme seems to have been surgically stripped away to leave nothing much of interest behind. After a few years of parenthood I’ve sat through enough cbeebies to be perhaps too aware of this sort of thing, so I don’t know if anyone else will even notice it’s not the same.

This is a personal watershed number one. We came back from honeymoon the Sunday this got to number one and called at my mum’s house to pick up the presents on the way. I put the chart rundown on specifically to see if this had got to number one – it was a silly newlywed’s joke between us – the very last time I would put that show on at (either past or present) home or be more than vaguely interested in a song’s chart position.
As my wife followed Corrie, at least for the next few years ( I caught TOTP sporadically for its remaining lifetime ), and The Chart Show was soon to be axed my knowledge of the charts absolutely disintegrates from this point. Now I have some CDs where I don’t know which were the singles let alone how high they got ( not very I suspect ).

So Popular for me here stops being a journey through the past and will largely be a voyage of discovery.

I appreciate Teletubbies wasn’t aimed at 6 year olds, but from AA Milne to Edward Ardizzone to Eric Carle to Michael Bond, the best childrens stories/books/TV appeal to parents as well as children alike. From friends of mine with kids of a certain age, I know In The Night Garden dd this too. Teletubbies and the nail-down-blackboard Tweenies seemed to gleefully piss on this tradition, and I can’t see an upside to this anymore than reading Richard Yates to a toddler.

Well, this 15-year-old Elastica fan bought it, for the same reason I went to see the Beavis & Butthead movie. Stupid things are funny. Funnier than sodding AS-level Maths, anyway.

14

I’m not suggesting that parents want to keep their offspring in a state of permanent juvenility, merely that they feel sad when they reject things they used to like as babies.

I’m sure I didn’t invent empty nest syndrome! I’m also sure I wasn’t the first person to hear their parent say, ‘you’ll always be my baby.’

I’m not trying to be a troll, I’m only trying to say that kids can’t wait to grow up and parents often like to try to slow things down a bit. It’s the cause of lots of disagreements between parents and kids, wouldn’t you say?

Five? I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed this strongly with Tom’s rating before. I’ve had a habit of comparing crap records to Robson and Jerome until now, but the fact is they were at least theoretically decent songs that happened to be sung by poor singers with cynical marketing behind them. I’ll gladly listen to R&J, “The Stonk”, or even the infamous “Grandma” single over ever, ever hearing this awful thing again. And I say that as someone who, while not a parent myself, has had plenty of exposure to children’s television and music through my nephew and godchildren. 1/10 only because the scale goes no lower.

BTW, appears no one has mentioned the Simon Cowell connection yet. On that note, here’s a classic related moment from American Idol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3LHQRTFTj8

Punchline around 2:30. The singer shown finished 10th that season, BTW.

Whatever happened to the sun baby I wonder? Likely to be taking his A Levels this year, or maybe on a gap year. It’s a weird claim to fame to have – and you’d think twice about putting it on your CV. As for the record, well there’s nothing wrong with making records for children – as Tom said on the ‘Two Little Boys’ entry – but it’s not something I’d ever want to hear again … 2

More of a Tweenies man myself.

The Teletubbies are the great might-have-beens of British popular music. Crossing all boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and body shape, they appealed, like no others before or since, right across the board: at one end, toddlers barely able to walk; at the other, the very hippest students. They could have had it all, so why they decided, after only one single, to concentrate on their TV careers is one of popular music’s greatest intractable mysteries. Perhaps only two weeks at Number One just wasn’t good enough.

In the meantime, we have a thrilling delight of a single to enjoy: a high-spirited romp with something for everyone, from irreverent renditions of nursery rhymes for the children to sly in-jokes for the students to spot. (Musicologists, too, will note that it expresses the same wide appeal in musical terms, changing keys from C, the pianist’s favourite, through D, to E, the guitarist’s favourite.) It’s the perfect way to introduce the ‘Tubbies (and, of course, their catchphrase), from the shy Po to the raucous Laa-Laa, and it’s performed with such glee, warmth, and generosity of spirit that, really, any further discussion is redundant. Oasis, Robson, Prodigy, Spices, Jerome, take note: *this* is how you do it. By any imaginable standards, this is a guaranteed cast-iron sure-fire dead-cert TEN.

In a world that probably only exists in my mind, The Outhere Brothers recorded “Boom boom boom/Teletubbies say eh oh/EH OH!!” Although I’m certain a mash-up exists somewhere.

The “Tony Blair” voice I believe, was Eric Sykes.

Also the habitat, the Teletubbies’ rural idyll must have informed Peter Jackson’s vision of Hobbiton, therefore TeletubbyLand is informed by Tolkien? On a very superficial level, the aesthetic is transferable, if not the culture, but you could imagine a Shire without Gandalf coming to visit Bilbo, cut off from the rest of Middle Earth, with hobbits going about their business untroubled by orcs, dwarves or elves, let alone men.

Back in 1997, my fashion choices were distinctly “of their time”. I owned a yellow Ralph Lauren button-down collar shirt. Whenever I wore it, my nickname immediately became Laa-laa. I didn’t keep the shirt for long.

#4 The relative lack of extreme novelty hits on the Hot 100 in an interesting thing I’ve often wondered about myself. This one could be explained by being a UK-based show (although one that also was shown in the US); however, a year later a US-based cartoon for adults would spawn a somewhat less annoying novelty number one in the UK that wouldn’t chart in the US either. The airplay component of the Hot 100 is a partial explanation, but you would still expect these singles to garner some sales, if they were in fact released in the US. The fact that many UK novelty sellers were apparently bought at supermarkets and other non-traditional locations may be another explanation, but other than that, who knows….

@28 I’ve been had! Still a great album, though, and highly recommended for all ages, whether you’re a fan of the show or not.

I hadn’t heard this before. It’s a lot more structured than the comments had led me to expect, actually. You can quite easily predict where it’s going – eight bars of this, eight of that, hokey breakdown; an obvious hook, which now can’t be heard as by anyone other than Mr Blair; repetition as appropriate. The first key change is bewildering, but the second is pretty standard.

I’ve cut my teeth, so to speak, on In The Night Garden, and tbh this is a lot less anarchic in comparison. You could easily make it sound much less random if you tried. Maybe the actual show was more unanchored?

In short, a reasonable effort and not as unmarkable as I’d been anticipating. (4)

I think we got there in the end, yes.

#36 I definitely understand, and mostly agree, with everything you’ve said on this thread. I certainly realize it’s wrong to call someone a lazy parent simply because they bought a record that I happen to dislike, but, ooh, does this record, and what (admittedly little) I’ve seen of the show itself, bug me….

#33 Tom, I know you’ve occasionally played records from this blog for your kids to comment on. Did you do that this time? I’m curious what they think now that they’re a bit older. I’d consider playing this for my 5 y.o. godson who certainly has his opinions on pop music, but A) I’m not sure I want to subject him, or his parents and sister, to that, and B) maybe I’m afraid his 5 y.o. tastes aren’t as discriminating as I think 😉

I only saw the Tellytubbies a handful of times, I think – certainly not enough to absorb the utopian/dystopian subtext detailed at post #1 (I also wasn’t aware that “we all become imprisoned by our former technological desires” – we do, do we?). It was certainly audacious TV – they would play a video clip, then the Tubbies would say “Again, again” and they’d repeat the exact same clip again. Obvious and inspired at the same time, but not really appealing to me as a 15-year-old.

It’s hard for me to rate this record as I don’t feel like an informed critic. I’m sure it went down well with its target audience, but maybe only because they were already fans of the show. I wonder how much a toddler who had never heard of the Tubs would enjoy it.

it’s fascinating how very early the “seven ages of pop guilt” structure* digs back: just as 20somethings wriggle around at the thought of themselves at 15, and teens of themselves at 12, apparently kids are mortified by their taste as tots and toddlers redden when reminded of what they liked as actual real babies — so when does it end? when are we free of this terrible cycle?

(ans = NEVER btw) (i have been looking at an essay on xenakis i wrote nine years ago, i.e. in my early 40s, and wincing at a couple of the words i used)

*it’s presumably a consequence of “each age group having its own culture”, which is partly a marketing thing of course, but more than that too — with historical curiosities (many of the earlier works of adult fiction — pilgrims’ progress, gullivers’ travels, jules verne — ended up as books that only children read) and counteractive curlicues: the more we detest our most recently cast-off tastes, the more (as a consequence?) we become fondly fascinated by those things our foolish younger selves spurned so furiously…

There’s quite a lot of albums of music for kids made by ‘proper’ bands these days – mostly compilations but the Barenaked Ladies and probably others have done full albums. They are hit and miss; a lot of groups seem to fall into a trap of making an adult’s idea of what children might like, often taking on a sort of Flaming Lips-type wide-eyedness that gets a bit wishy washy for real kids.

The best example I’ve come across is Jackie Jackson by Franz Ferdinand, a cautionary tale about a boy who eats too many cakes. It’s highly enjoyable by adults but also got a great reaction when I played it to my nephew.

#42 HA 🙂 Funny thing about “Barbie Girl” though: recently inspired by the posting on this site, I sang, not played, the “I’m a Barbie girl..” part in the presence of my godson. He immediately started singing it too, despite the fact he had apparently never heard it before! And no, he had never heard of Barbie, and strangely his parents claimed to have never heard the song either, even though it was a hit here in 97 (maybe they were just blocking it from memory). Anyway, maybe he was just amused by Uncle Dave singing something so silly.

FWIW, the first song I ever remember loving as a kid (probably around 4-5) was a kiddie version of “Yellow Rose of Texas” of all things. I was quite pleased to find out many years later the Mitch Miller version of YROT was a genuine #1 hit on the Hot 100’s precursor Best Sellers chart back in 1956.

“And just be grateful we don’t have to deal with The Wheels on the Bus. I’d cheerfully strangle whoever it was came up with that one.”

Five years later, I watch Top of the Pops and can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuIJWG13wvE