There's a moment in the mailbag that we didn't plan for, which was the Teletubbies episode refusing to die. People kept sending it back.
The follow-ups outnumbered the original, which almost never happens.
So Daniel came back with a second one, and it's bigger than the first. His argument is that the weirdness was never the point. The point was that behind the weirdness sat a real idea about how adults should relate to children — about finding a language that meets them where they are instead of forcing our adult preconceptions onto people who learn language in a much more natural way.
That's the whole thing, right there.
He says what the show actually proved is that there's more to the Teletubbies than meets the eye, and that it was heartening to learn the people making this kind of media come to it from genuine passion. Then he tells us one of his own creative aspirations is an AI-generated children's show.
I wondered if that was coming.
And his framing for it — I want to get this right — is that the world of children is a kind of pure magic, and that when adults create for it, they get renewed by it. Almost symbiotic. Children believe in their own purity, and that purity refreshes the jaded world grown-ups live in.
Symbiotic is the right word for it. I've been chewing on that since he sent it.
So the ask is this. Find other artists who made content for children and were also pushing boundaries, even when the surface read as ordinary kids' programming. So let's start with the man who wrote the gibberish — because he wasn't guessing.
He absolutely was not guessing. Andrew Davenport studied speech sciences at University College London, nineteen eighty-three to eighty-seven. Vocational training for speech therapy. He went in intending to be a speech therapist.
And then didn't.
Then didn't. From eighty-eight to ninety-four he was working in experimental theatre and performance art. He worked with the conceptual performance artist Gary Stevens. He performed at the ICA, the Serpentine, the Hayward, the National Review of Live Art. He modelled for Gilbert and George's nineteen ninety-two piece Eyes.
So the man who wrote Eh-oh was a trained speech scientist and a performance artist.
That combination is the entire thesis of this episode. Everything strange about that show comes out of those two facts.
Anne Wood is the other half of it, and her path is different but just as unlikely. Trained as a teacher, then a children's book editor — she founded Books for Your Children magazine in nineteen sixty-five, the Federation of Children's Book Groups in sixty-nine, won the Eleanor Farjeon Award the same year. Founded Ragdoll Productions in eighty-four. Rosie and Jim, Tots TV, Brum, Boohbah, In the Night Garden.
All of which are strange in their own registers.
Teletubbies premieres the thirty-first of March, nineteen ninety-seven, on BBC2. And the reason his background matters is that it explains every strange choice the show made.
Start with his own account of why he built it the way he did. From a UCL alumni interview, and I'm going to give this close to verbatim because it's the clearest statement of the idea Daniel is reaching for. He says: "There was a tendency for makers of children's TV to come from a teaching background, and the accepted form often involved a presenter or teacher leading a group of puppets or children in learning things. It seemed to me to portray a situation alien to the culture of the younger preschool child."
Alien.
"They learn by self-motivated experimentation, establishing connections and patterns, by gradually assimilating rules and adapting them to accommodate new experiences. Television seemed uniquely well-equipped to address these processes."
That's a man in the mid-nineties saying the entire grammar of preschool television is wrong. The teacher at the front, the puppets as pupils, the lesson structure. He's saying that's not how a three-year-old experiences the world, so why are we building shows around it?
And he didn't just complain about it. He built the alternative. He described the show's rationale as developmental rather than educational. That's his phrase.
Which sounds like a small distinction and isn't.
It isn't, because it changes what you're allowed to put on screen. If the goal is education, you need to demonstrate something. You need A to lead to B. If the goal is development, you're modelling the conditions under which a child's own learning machinery runs. Repetition. Pattern. Anticipation and payoff. Cause and effect at the scale a toddler actually operates.
So the gibberish isn't gibberish.
The gibberish is the language. Eh-oh and uh-oh are phonetically simple, they're repeated constantly, they're tied to consistent events. That's exactly the structure of early language acquisition. He took what he knew about how children acquire sounds and rules and built a show out of it instead of building a show that taught those things explicitly.
The toddler proportions are the same move.
Same move. And here's the detail that always gets me. He got the characters from astronauts.
Say that again.
He was watching the Apollo eleven footage, and he noticed that in a bulky suit, with the helmet and the inflated body, a grown man has roughly the proportions of a toddler. Big head, short limbs, wide body. And the way they move in low gravity — bouncing, slow, deliberate, slightly clumsy — reads like how a very small child moves.
So he's watching the most important technological event of the century and what he takes from it is a body plan for a preschool character.
That's the mind you're dealing with. He's not cribbing from other children's shows. He's pulling from the Moon landing and from speech science and from performance art, and it all lands in the same design.
The tummy screens.
Great example of a constraint turning into an identity. The BBC required real children to appear on the show. But the Teletubbies are monster-sized relative to a child. You can't put a three-year-old next to a seven-foot creature and have anything read naturally. So the belly screens solve it. The children appear on film, inside the Teletubby, at a scale that works.
And that becomes the single most recognisable image from the show.
The thing people remember. And it exists because of a commissioning requirement. He didn't fight the constraint, he used it.
How seriously are we supposed to take his writing, though? Because it's easy to be charmed by the astronaut thing and the speech science and still file all of it under clever gimmickry.
Russell T Davies — who ran Doctor Who, who has written for the BBC for decades — has said he rates Davenport's writing alongside Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett.
Beckett.
Stoppard and Beckett. That's not a man being polite about a preschool show.
There's a reason that comparison isn't as mad as it sounds. Beckett is the great writer of repetition — of two people in a bare space, doing the same thing again, with the language pared down to almost nothing and the meaning carried by the pattern rather than the words. That's the Teletubbies.
And the industry recognised it too. In twenty fourteen it took the Prix Jeunesse award for Most Edgy Programme of the Last Fifty Years.
Most edgy.
Fifty years. That's a category covering everything anyone made for children in half a century, and they gave it to the show with the giggling vacuum cleaner.
What did the critics say at the time?
Variety's Ray Richmond called it plenty surrealistic, loaded with bizarre Peter Max-style imagery. The New York Times — Caryn James — said it was a appealing combination: cute and slightly surreal. It picked up a cult following among university students for exactly those psychedelic qualities.
Which is not a demographic anyone plans for.
No. But it's the tell. When adults watch a preschool show voluntarily and don't have a child in the room, something in the construction is doing more than the surface says.
Then there's the controversy, and I'd argue the controversy is evidence rather than noise.
Strong evidence. The Daily Mirror reported parents objecting to the goo-goo style, worried the babbling would damage their children's language development. Which, given Davenport's training, is a lovely inversion — the one man in British television who actually studied language acquisition is being told by the paper that he's wrecking it.
The Lion and Bear sketch.
A magical event sequence judged too unsettling, and banned in several countries. Still the strangest thing in a show that is nothing but strange things.
And then Jerry Falwell, nineteen ninety-nine.
Claims Tinky Winky is a gay role model. Because he's purple and his antenna is a triangle.
The BBC's response is one of my favourite sentences in the history of broadcasting.
"Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag." Which is a remarkable amount of dignity under fire.
The gay community embraced the character off the back of it. WildBrain later launched a Teletubbies Pride Collection supporting GLAAD.
So the show that critics said would harm children's language became a flashpoint in a culture war, and then, twenty-odd years on, a Pride campaign. That's a lot of second-order life for a show about four creatures eating toast.
Scale, for context.
Aired in over a hundred and twenty countries, forty-five languages. The single "Teletubbies say Eh-oh" hit number one in the UK in December ninety-seven, stayed in the Top Seventy-five for thirty-two weeks, sold over a million copies. Over a billion pounds in merchandise by two thousand.
A billion pounds.
From a speech sciences graduate who wanted to be a therapist.
So here's where I land on the whole thing. The weirdness was the surface, and the developmental theory was the substance, and the audience — including all those university students — responded to the substance without necessarily knowing it was there.
That's the mechanism. The weirdness was load-bearing.
Davenport is one instance of a pattern. And Daniel asked for the others.
He asked for it, so let's give him the others. Fred Rogers is the first name and arguably the most radical, and the reason people undersell him is that the surface is so gentle they assume there's nothing underneath.
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, sixty-eight to two thousand one.
He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who went into television because, in his words, "I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen."
He hated television, so he went to work in it.
He studied child development at Pittsburgh and started a thirty-year collaboration with a child psychologist named Margaret McFarland, who shaped how he thought about children for the rest of his life. That's the equivalent of Davenport's speech sciences degree — a technical foundation nobody watching would guess at.
What did that foundation let him do?
It let him treat children's inner lives as serious. He did episodes on death, divorce, sibling rivalry, a new baby, moving house. And in June of sixty-eight, two days after Robert Kennedy was shot, he did a special about it. On air, for preschoolers, days after the event.
Two days.
Because he thought the alternative — saying nothing, letting children absorb it alone — was worse. That's a judgement about what children can handle that almost nobody was making at the time.
And the contrast with Sesame Street is the illuminating part.
Sesame Street is cognitive. Letters, numbers, school readiness. Mister Rogers is the psyche. Feelings, fear, anger, what to do with a thing you can't name. Same era, same medium, entirely different theory of what a child needs.
The Senate testimony.
Nineteen sixty-nine. He went before a Senate subcommittee that was about to cut funding for public broadcasting. He had the statement prepared. And instead of reading it, he recited the lyrics to one of his songs. "What do you do with the mad that you feel, when you feel so mad you could bite?"
He sang his way through a funding hearing.
Senator John Pastore, who had been openly impatient with the whole proceeding, said it gave him goosebumps. Congressional funding for public broadcasting went from nine million to twenty-two million.
Two days of testimony compressed into a song, and it more than doubled the budget.
Then the foot-bath. Nineteen sixty-nine. Rogers is soaking his feet in a wading pool on screen, and he invites Officer Clemmons, a Black police officer played by François Clemmons, to share the water. And Clemmons does, and then Rogers dries his feet with a towel.
In sixty-nine.
A white man and a Black man sharing a foot-bath on national children's television, in a year when that was a live fight in a lot of places. And François Clemmons was gay, which Rogers knew, and he kept him on the show for decades.
He answered every letter.
By hand. He called it a pastoral duty of sorts. And he described the space between the viewer and the television set as holy ground.
Holy ground.
Which is a minister's way of saying the screen is not a delivery mechanism. It's a place where something real happens between two people.
Now we go from holy ground to Paul Reubens, which is a jump.
It's a jump, and it's the clearest case anyone has of children's programming that was actually boundary-pushing art wearing a kids' show as a disguise. Pee-wee's Playhouse, eighty-six to ninety.
How did a Saturday morning kids' show get that much creative room?
Reubens got full creative control and a prime-time sitcom budget from CBS. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars an episode. For Saturday morning. That number is the whole story — nobody had ever spent that on children's television, and the reason he got it is that he was a phenomenon and CBS wanted him badly enough to give away the keys.
And he spent it on underground artists.
The set and design were built by a troupe of punk and underground artists. Gary Panter, Wayne White, Ric Heitzman, Phil Trumbo. Aardman Animations did early work on it before Wallace and Gromit. Craig Bartlett, who later created Hey Arnold, worked on it.
Panter's line about it?
"This was like the hippie dream. It was a show made by artists. We put art history all over the show."
The music is the part that gets me.
Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo, Todd Rundgren, Danny Elfman, The Residents, Van Dyke Parks, Dweezil Zappa. And the theme song was sung by Cyndi Lauper under the pseudonym Ellen Shaw. Which is the single greatest piece of unnecessary secrecy in television.
Why the pseudonym?
Nobody's ever fully explained it. Which is why I love it.
And Reubens' own framing of what he was doing.
"I'm just trying to illustrate that it's okay to be different. Not that it's good, not that it's bad, but that it's all right. I'm trying to tell kids to have a good time and to encourage them to be creative and to question things."
The Bob Keeshan quote is the endorsement that matters, though, because Keeshan was Captain Kangaroo.
Decades of children's television behind him. And he said that with the possible exception of the Muppets, you can't find such creativity anywhere on TV.
Punk musicians, underground set designers, a prime-time budget, and it's read as a kids' show. Same pattern as Davenport, different ingredients.
Then Yo Gabba Gabba, and this one is the most direct proof of Daniel's symbiosis idea, because the creators are exactly the people he's describing.
Two punk rockers from Southern California.
Christian Jacobs, who was the lead singer of The Aquabats, and Scott Schultz. Neither of them had ever worked in children's television. Neither had any background in education. They made a self-financed pilot and put it online, and Jared Hess — who directed Napoleon Dynamite — saw it and recommended it to Nickelodeon. That's the whole origin story.
And what they built was deliberately a dual-audience show.
Deliberately. The guest stars were indie and alternative music acts. Devo, The Flaming Lips, MGMT, The Shins, Weezer, My Chemical Romance, Erykah Badu, Biz Markie, Mark Mothersbaugh again, Weird Al Yankovic. The visual language came from eight-bit video games and H.R. Pufnstuf.
The title itself is a punk reference.
"Gabba gabba hey" is from the Ramones. They just put a Yo in front of it and made it a kids' show.
And it went to Coachella.
Two thousand ten, and again in twenty twenty-five. College audiences. James Poniewozik in Time said it will convince you someone slipped something into your Fruity Pebbles.
The learning model is the part I want to sit on.
They said the point was for parents and older siblings and younger children to watch together. Not to use the television as a babysitter. Which is, functionally, a statement about the family as a viewing unit rather than the child as an isolated consumer.
And it's still running. Yo Gabba GabbaLand on Apple TV Plus. First season August twenty twenty-four, second season January twenty twenty-six, with a twelve-year-old host now, Kammy Kam.
Which is its own interesting choice — aging the host up rather than down.
A few names worth a line each, because Daniel asked for a survey and we should give him one. Jim Henson. Oliver Postgate. The Krofft brothers. The Brothers Chaps.
Henson is the obvious one and doesn't need much — Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock. Puppetry as an art form rather than a delivery technology. TCA Award in nineteen ninety.
Postgate matters more here than people realise, because he's Davenport's absolute hero. Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine. Small, handmade, quietly strange British children's television made on almost nothing.
Sid and Marty Krofft — H.R. Pufnstuf, The Banana Splits. Psychedelic live-action puppet shows, and they're the direct visual ancestor of Yo Gabba Gabba. Jacobs and Schultz have said so.
And the Brothers Chaps — Homestar Runner — plus Julia Vickerman, later writers on Yo Gabba Gabba, bringing internet-native and indie-comics sensibilities into kids' TV.
Which is the bridge generation. That's the first wave of people whose formative creative education happened online, and they ended up writing for preschoolers.
Now, the symbiosis. Daniel's framing. And I want to actually test it rather than just admire it, because it's a big claim.
Test it, because I think it holds.
Pee-wee's Playhouse is the cleanest case. Adults making a kids' show that gave themselves and Gen X a creative outlet. Underground artists, punk musicians, comedians pouring their real aesthetic into children's programming — and adults watching it for the subversive energy of it, during the Reagan and Bush years.
That's not a side effect. That's the design. Reubens knew the adult audience was there and built for them.
Yo Gabba Gabba does the same thing with the Super Music Friends Show. That's not a watered-down kids' segment with a musician in it. It's a real creative platform. A band comes on and makes a genuine piece of work for toddlers.
And the bands took it seriously. That's the thing. Nobody phoned it in. You can hear it in the songs.
Rogers is the sacred version of the same idea. He framed the relationship as holy ground, and his words resurface every time there's a Sandy Hook, a Manchester, a Parkland. Adults go back to him for comfort. The show made for children becomes the thing adults reach for when the world breaks.
And Davenport is the purest version of it, because he's literal about it. He re-watches Oliver Postgate DVDs at the start of every project. His stated reason is to connect himself to the mind of the child he was when he first saw them.
A grown man putting on Bagpuss to get back to a way of seeing he lost.
That's the entire symbiosis argument in one habit. He's not making the show for the child. He's using the child he used to be to make the show. And then the show goes out and does the same thing to other adults.
Which is why the philosophy scales. In the Night Garden, two thousand seven to two thousand nine, built to give children a positive narrative around going to sleep. Two BAFTAs.
Moon and Me in twenty nineteen is where he gets almost absurd about it. He partnered with the University of Sheffield to run a study of children's play. They built a toy house with cameras and microphones in it and watched how kids actually played with it, and what came out was their real interests within small world play — stairs, doorbells, tea time.
Not what an adult would guess.
Not remotely. Nobody writing from an office would have put doorbells at the centre of anything.
And he won't use CGI.
Refuses it. Real objects, rod puppets, over five hundred miniature props, stop-motion filmed in camera. Every time. It costs him enormous amounts of time and money and he does it anyway.
Which is the point where Daniel's aspiration runs into something.
It does. And I want to be careful here because I think his instinct is good and the tension is real. His stated goal is an AI-generated children's show. Davenport's entire method is the opposite of what generative AI does by default.
Say more, because I think people will hear that and assume you're just being a purist about craft.
It's not purism. It's a claim about what actually communicates to a small child. Davenport rejects CGI and insists on handmade objects and in-camera filming because the materiality is the message. A puppet that exists has weight. It has imperfection. It has a person behind it whose hand you can almost feel. A very young child is reading all of that, even if they can't articulate any of it.
Tim Jonze in The Guardian credited his success to painstaking research and a slightly terrifying insight into these unknowable little minds.
Right. And the question for an AI-generated show is whether that insight can be produced without the research. I don't know. I'm not going to pretend I do.
There's also a safety dimension that isn't abstract.
There is. In twenty twenty-three, 404 Media published an investigation into an Andreessen Horowitz-funded AI image platform that found it had generated images that could be categorised as child sexual abuse material. That was discussed widely at the time.
Which is the thing traditional children's television spent decades building defences against.
Entirely. There's a safeguarding culture in that industry that outsiders don't see. Sets where visitors are blindfolded so they can't identify child performers, so the children can't be found later. Protocols layered on protocols. And AI children's media has no equivalent yet, because it's mostly individual developers working alone. Childbook, StoryBee, Zanki — these are small solo projects. Good-faith experiments, but there's no institutional machinery around them.
So the gap isn't the technology. It's the culture that grew up around the technology.
The culture is the part that took forty years to build. The models took eighteen months. That's the asymmetry.
One more current note to land on. In twenty twenty-five, Davenport and Anne Wood jointly received the J.M. Barrie Award for lifetime achievement in children's arts.
Twenty-eight years after Eh-oh. Still being honoured, still working, still the same philosophy.
The puppets were built heavier than they needed to be.
Sorry?
In a puppet workshop. I worked in one for a while, badly. They supplied rod puppets to a British children's production. And the puppets were always built slightly heavier than they had to be, on purpose.
Why heavier?
Because the performers wanted to feel the weight. A heavier puppet moves slower. Slower reads as more deliberate on camera. And the children watching read that deliberateness as care. That was the whole theory. Heavier puppet, slower movement, looks like it means it.
That's a design decision nobody would ever put in a document.
Nobody did. It was just known. You built them heavy because that's how they were built.
And the rejected ones?
There was a shelf of rejected heads in the workshop. Moulds that didn't make it. And nearly all of them had the same problem. They'd been made to look clever rather than to look like they were thinking.
Say that again.
A head made to look clever reads as clever. A head made to look like it's thinking reads as alive. The children can tell the difference. It was never written down anywhere. Everyone in the workshop knew it.
So the whole episode is on that shelf.
I'd say so. Everyone's talking about the writing and the theory and the awards, and that's all true. But the boundary-pushing was also in the objects. The props, the miniature furniture, the puppets. The reason he won't use CGI isn't nostalgia. It's that a real object has a real weight and a real imperfection, and a small child can tell the difference between a thing that was made and a thing that was generated.
So an AI children's show lives or dies on whether it can fake that weight.
It does. And I don't think it can. But I don't think that's a tragedy either. I think it means the show has to be about something else. There's more than one way to be honest with a child. That's all I've got. I'd like to get to the end of the shift.
The shelf of rejected heads. Heads made to look clever instead of made to look like they were thinking.
That's the tie on the whole thing. The boundary-pushing in children's media was never in the ambition. It was in the care. And care is material. It's weight and imperfection and a person deciding a puppet should be two ounces heavier than it needs to be.
Which leaves Daniel's question open. If the weight and imperfection of a handmade object is what speaks to a very young child, then what does an AI-generated children's show have to be about instead? Not less than that. Something else. And nobody knows yet what the something else is.
The J.M. Barrie Award in twenty twenty-five to Wood and Davenport is the note I'd end on. The work is still being honoured. The pattern is still live. Somebody's going to make the AI version, and the question is whether they've thought about the shelf of rejected heads.
If you've got a view on that, or a show we should have mentioned, write to us. Reviews help other people find the show. The producer of this program is Hilbert Flumingtop, who does not want to hear about any more puppets.
Not one more.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We'll be back soon.
