In The Night Garden: Bedtime for Teletubbies

Anne Wood, creator of the Teletubbies, has a theory as to why so many children cry at the end of her surreal new show, In The Night Garden. The national bedtime routine has, it seems, been punctuated in recent weeks by sounds of plaintive wailing each evening as the Tombliboos snuggle down and the Pinky Ponk sets sail into the sunset.

"I hear that so much - we have a lot of parents telling us this," the former schoolteacher explains. "I always want to make a programme that enfolds the viewer in it and I think this one has created that feeling better than any other," she says.

For the uninitiated, In The Night Garden with its bizarrely-named inhabitants and their psychedelic modes of transport, is the first collaboration between Mrs Wood and former children's performer Andy Davenport since they introduced the world to Laa-Laa and Tinky Winky and friends in 1997.

Teletubbies is one of the most successful TV franchises of all time and spawned a lucrative global merchandising operation. It proved a money-spinner for its creators and their partners at the BBC who sold it around the globe. Since then, the broadcasting world has waited anxiously to see what they will come up with next.

The result of their collaboration has been more than five years in the making. It cost £14.5m, equivalent to the budget of a small feature film or nearly half the amount spent by British commercial broadcasters on children's programming last year.

Billed as an oasis of peace in an angst-ridden world, Night Garden depicts a succession of engagingly surreal characters and their mind-bogglingly benign adventures. To viewers of a certain age, it bears a passing resemblance to surreal 1970s classics such as Magic Roundabout, a new 52-part series of which was announced yesterday.

The action, what there is of it, is set in sun-dappled, computer graphic-enhanced woodland. Shot in high definition with actors clad in giant costumes, it is filmed at a secret location somewhere outside Stratford-upon-Avon - the producers having learnt the importance of discretion after Teletubbie land became a magnet for tourists and drunken revellers. Much of the wizardry is added in the post-production process while the dialogue amounts to little more than the characters repeating their names over and over again.

Its makers describe the end result as a, "magical picture book place that exists between waking and sleeping". While the exploits of Igglepiggle, Makka Pakka and their pals are frankly indecipherable to the average adult, to children, they are unalloyed pleasure.

The inspiration for the new series came out of a growing disquiet felt by Mrs Wood at the way young children were responding to the world's all too harrowing problems in a media-saturated age. But she says it was Mr Davenport who invented the characters, composed the hypnotic music and wrote the scripts.

"For a variety of reasons, I began to be aware that there was an increasing experience of anxiety around among children," explains Mrs Wood, a 69-year-old grandmother. "Whether this was because of 11 September or terrorism in this country or in general you get the sense we are living in anxious times. One of the results was that a lot of children didn't seem to want to go to bed," she said. As a consequence the events of the Night Garden always conclude with the characters bedding down happily for the night. Not that the phrase "go to bed" ever passes the lips of the show's distinguished narrator, the Shakespearean actor Sir Derek Jacobi. It was found to be way too confrontational in audience tests.

Perhaps as a result of this softly-softly approach, anecdotal evidence suggests many children now insist on watching the programme in their pyjamas. Once their disappointment at its conclusion has subsided, they are also said to show a marked reduced reluctance to hit the sack.

Naturally enough it is not only parents who are excited by the opportunities afforded by the show. Since broadcasting the first of the 100 planned episodes last month, the BBC has reported a doubling of the early evening audience for its digital children's channel CBeebies. Each night some 500,000 viewers are tuning in - a very respectable showing for a niche channel and not bad for many adult daytime shows, the corporation says.

In a clear sign of their high hopes, BBC Worldwide has dispatched 100 executives to the the annual MipTV trade show in Cannes this week. One of their priorities will be to convince international television buyers that they have a global children's hit on their hands. Night Garden has already been sold to New Zealand and the BBC will be hoping to replicate the success of Teletubbies the format of which was sold to 120 countries and earned £500m through spin-off sales.

Night Garden merchandising, DVDs, Iggle Piggle dolls and other ways of "extending the experience" are due to arrive in the shops in the summer. The show's makers, Ragdoll Productions, signed a deal to make the toy producer Hasbro a global partner long before the show hit the screens. Business managers admit they were caught on the hop by the demand for Teletubbies merchandising.

No one could quite have predicted the popularity of Teletubbies. The Bafta-winning show ran to 375 programmes. It spawned a number one hit single, "Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh", which spent 32 weeks in the charts. It was also the subject of some controversy. Some complained that its target audience - aged four and under - were too young to be exposed to television. In another extraordinary development, Tinky Winky was denounced from the pulpit by the evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell, who claimed the character symbolised homosexuality

Ragdoll will be hoping the world has calmed down a bit since then but one thing they are sure of is that Night Garden is being launched into a totally different commercial environment.

According to Mrs Wood, the new series cost twice as much to make as its predecessor though she believes it is unlikely to match the runaway financial success.

"Teletubbies was a product of its time. I don't think it can be repeated," she said. Mrs Wood has become a prominent critic of the state of children's television in Britain. Although the BBC continues to invest around £80m a year, commercial channels are accused of cutting back on the scheduling and commissionings. The blame for the crisis dates back to the 2006 ruling by Ofcom, the industry regulator, that banned junk food advertising during children's programmes. Initially popular with parents, it has left a £39m hole in production budgets.

"This could be the last big show that we make. Where will we get our funding from in the future? This sort of quality has to sell internationally to finance itself," Mrs Wood explains.

Professor Maire Messenger Davies, director of the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster believes commercial broadcasters have used the Ofcom ban as an excuse to ditch children's programmes in favour of alternatives more attractive to advertisers. She fears that younger audiences face the prospect of growing up on a diet of foreign cartoons.

"Children are no different from adults - they don't want to watch only imported shows or a single genre. They want to watch stuff that reflects the society that they live in," she says. "You don't get good children's programming on the cheap. You have to invest in a lot in background research, direction, pacing and lighting. To make something really good you have to put the money in and in the case of Ragdoll you can get it back again."

Greg Childs, the secretary of the campaign group Save Kids TV, formed in the wake of the Ofcom decision, praises Night Garden as a powerful example of British children's programme making at its best. "It looks fabulous and wonderful. But not all programmes should have to be global to be viable," he warns. Present-day cuts could have far reaching implications for tomorrow's society, he says.

"How can the Government think they are going to create an economy which is full of vibrant and creative people if the young people coming through don't see themselves in television but instead see some sort of amalgam in some mid-Atlantic scenario. This is why when surveys ask kids what number they should dial in an emergency they say 911."

Back in the Night Garden, the message is all together more soothing. Mrs Wood, who trained as a speech therapist before moving into television, producing hits such as Pob's Programme and Rosie and Jim believes the show offers positive values as well as providing entertainment.

"We have created a community of characters who live together, like and respect each other. It was our intention to make it like a beautiful nursery rhyme picture book unfolding a little piece at a time. It is all about atmosphere."

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