The Teletubbies are back: ‘It’s still about love, and wibbly-wobbly bottoms’

It’s a weird sensation, being hugged by all four Teletubbies at once. One, two – even three – is a manageable number of Teletubbies to be hugged by; they’re bigger than you expect, but the squidge of their bellies still offers a modicum of comfort.

But then the 10ft colossus Tinky Winky lumbers in from behind, cutting off your escape route, and you start to feel like you’re suffocating. You become Ewan McGregor, sinking into the carpet in Trainspotting. You crane your head and gasp for air. Who knew the Teletubbies were so powerful?

To be fair, everyone did. In their time, the Teletubbies were as unstoppable as they were ubiquitous. Designed in the late 1990s expressly for pre-schoolers – and modelled on then-cutting-edge speech development theory – they quickly found themselves being adopted by bored university students and recovering clubbers. They were shown around the world in dozens of languages. Sales of their merchandise quickly topped £1bn. There was a No 1 single. The Simpsons dressed up as them. Televangelists warned that they would damage the moral fibre of our children. They received the keys to New York City. In their time, the Teletubbies were inescapable.

They still are. Even though no new episodes have aired since 2001, the characters remain part of the cultural conversation. The BBC still airs the original series. Something like 65 million people watch old episodes on YouTube every month. On Twitter, they’re still making the same old jokes about what the Sun Baby looks like now. It’s like they’ve never been away.

But now they’re back. A brand new 60-episode series of Teletubbies will be broadcast soon on CBeebies. Obviously, when something as beloved as Teletubbies is remade, the only sensible reaction is outright horror. What if the new series destroys everything that people loved about them? There were reports that the new Teletubbies would have iPads in their tummies instead of televisions, but what if that was just the tip of the iceberg? What if they all wore trainers now? What if they rapped, or listened to dubstep, or ate at Nando’s? What if one of the new episodes featured Dipsy’s endeavours to open a small-batch artisinal ketchup pop-up? It’d be a catastrophe.

Thankfully, though, as I arrive at the Teletubbies studio in Twickenham during the last week of filming in May, faithfulness appears to be the absolute watchword. Billy Macqueen, one of the revival’s masterminds, is especially keen to stress that – if anything – this is actually a preservation.

“The thing that really scared us is that Teletubbies was filmed nearly 18 years ago, and not in HD,” he says. “Even now, it’s like watching sepia. So in a few years, the original series won’t be shown at all.” Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been any advances. Because clumping around a field was such a headache first time around, for example, that all the exterior scenes are now created indoors using bluescreen and miniature sets.

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The costumes – using techniques that original Teletubbies designer Niki Lyons learned on Where the Wild Things Are – are now lighter and more performer-friendly. And, yes, purists be warned, the screens on their bellies do look an awful lot like iPads. But Macqueen stresses that this was for practical purposes only.

“Kids’ TV producers in their 40s and 50s tend to produce from their own childhoods, so they leave out things like touchscreens and tablets. But there’s been a big move from CBeebies to have the characters use the sort of devices that children use now. So, yes, the Teletubbies’ screens are touchscreen.” They’re widescreen too, but only because all the little real-world films were shot in an industry-standard 16:9 aspect ratio.

Aside from that, everything is more or less the same. Macqueen – who has a habit of summing up the show’s practical, performer-led ethos by referring to bums – points out that the characters’ eyes and mouth are still operated by hand from within the costume. “If you send it off to the massive 10-gigabyte CGI factory,” he says, “you can lose control, you can lose the love, and you can lose the wibbly-wobbly bottoms.”

In fact, so staunch is this intention to stick to the blueprint that around 40% of the new series will be remade from the original scripts. Producers – along with writer Catherine Williams – pored over 200 scripts to find what was most suitable, with Catherine filling in the blanks. “Reading those scripts, I always wanted to know how they ended, even though there was no jeopardy, no stakes, no character motivation,” she says. “It’s very simple and very in the moment. It’s pure.”

I ask if all this exposure to the material has given her an insight into the secret of the Teletubbies’ success. “There’s this magical balance between anticipation and surprise,” she says. “Often, you know where everything’s going – Tinky Winky’s done it, Dipsy’s done it, Laa Laa’s done it, so now Po’s going to do it – but the ending is often unexpected. However, the real magic is the four of them looking to camera and just blinking expectantly. I could watch that all day. Basically the Teletubbies sharing an emotion, that’s what the whole show is about.”

Macqueen has a different idea. “Children still love stories at the heart of it, and this show is still about stories, and it’s still about love, and it’s still about wibbly-wobbly bottoms,” he repeats.

For me, stepping into the studio and seeing the interior of the Teletubbies dome – now a vast inflatable – is like stepping into a memory. What makes my set visit more disconcerting is that Noo-noo, the Teletubbies’ sentient vacuum cleaner friend, is already bumbling around the place of his own accord.

Then the Teletubbies walk in, and the illusion is complete. Throughout my visit, I am struck by how fearsomely the reality of the show is maintained. During filming, the Teletubbies are all called by their characters’ names, and they respond entirely in character, voice and lip movements and all. They even hug in character, for crying out loud. The names of the new performers are – for the moment at least – top secret, but they all seem so relentlessly method that I wouldn’t be surprised if Tinky Winky turned out to be Daniel Day-Lewis.

The illusion is only broken a couple of times, but in the most unexpected way. After the take I witness comes to an end (spoiler alert: it is from the scene where Po rides her scooter up to the camera, then pats her scooter, then says the word “scooter”), a stranger charges up to her with an industrial leaf blower and literally shoves it down her throat. For legal reasons, it turns out that the performers are only allowed to wear their suits for 20 minutes of each hour, and the combination of the high temperatures and physical nature of the performances means that they have to be cooled down constantly.

The world has changed beyond recognition over the last two decades, and the children of 2015 won’t want the same things as the children of 1997, to the extent that they don’t even watch television in the same way. Whether the Teletubbies can recapture the old magic remains to be seen, but my fingers are crossed. My son has just entered the key Teletubbies demographic, and I can’t wait to sit down and watch these new episodes with him. Not least because I managed to wangle a not-for-publication photo of me hugging Laa-Laa and Po that I intend to use solely for the purposes of teaching my son what a cool dad he’s got.

But who am I kidding? People will still watch Teletubbies. Like Macqueen says, it’s still a show about love, and it’s still a show about wibbly-wobbly bottoms. Those things never go out of style.