Why the Teletubbies reboot is a welcome return to Laa-Laa land

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/07/teletubbies-reboot-return-cbeebies

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Thank heavens Teletubbies is being rebooted. After it stopped being made in 2001, the series became nothing more than a fixed point in time by which self-obsessed millennials could chart their gradual decay. “Here’s what the Sun Baby looks like now!” they’d crow, before tweeting a picture of Charlie Chaplin or Kim Jong-un or the screaming skull from the end of that Indiana Jones film. “Feel old yet?”

Related: Teletubbies set to return to CBeebies with new cast

But now that CBeebies has made a clutch of new Teletubbies episodes set to be broadcast later this year, we can all rest easy. Sure, we’ll have to wait and see whether they can match something like Baby Jake in terms of abstract nonsense. And, sure, some of the planned updates might seem a little wrongheaded – Jane Horrocks is apparently voicing some sort of smartphone now, which sounds like it might set the scene for episodes where Po downloads Tinder, or Dipsy accidentally runs up a bill of several thousand pounds by fundamentally misunderstanding the freemium business model. But at least Teletubbies will be catering for actual children again, rather than gormless 22-year-olds who shout “classic” whenever Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh is played ironically during student disco night.

And that’s a good thing, because, despite all its psychedelic woo-woo, Teletubbies was always precision-engineered for young children. It was colourful enough to grab their attention, but slow enough to remain clear. In fact, the storytelling could be so simplistic that some episode descriptions (“Episode 117: the Teletubbies watch some children look for eggs”; “Episode 258: Tinky Winky hears a scary noise and runs away, while children pretend to be animals”) can make the whole thing sound like an unholy cross between The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The Wicker Man.

The characters managed to remain distinct, too. Tinky Winky was the leader, Po the innocent youngster, Laa-Laa the consensus-at-all-costs peacekeeper and Dipsy the Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wildcard figure. That’s a hard trick to pull off when your audience is still in nappies – show me a person who can tell the Boohbahs apart, for instance, and I’ll show you a goddamned liar.

Teletubbies was the Gillette Mach 3 of infant TV. You could trace the gradual process that led to its birth in shows like Pob and Tots TV, but follow-ups like Tonji and Twirlywoos – while obviously taking their inspiration from it – lacked the quicksilver spark that made it such a sensation. There’s a chance the reboot might fail catastrophically, but the foundations are so solid that it shouldn’t.

If it sounds like I’m talking up the return of Teletubbies too much, it’s probably because I’m invariably going to end up watching more of it than anything else on television. My baby son is too young for it at the moment – he currently prefers staring at abstract shadows in the corner of the room to any sort of structured programming – but if this reboot lasts even half as long as the original run, he’ll soon find himself slap-bang in the middle of the Teletubbies’ target demographic. He’s bound to enjoy watching it. And despite my delusions of sophistication, I’m bound to enjoy watching it with him.

Clearly, I’ll have to disown him 21 years from now when he’s dancing ironically to the theme tune at university, but let’s worry about that when we need to.