In the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, it's not easy being green. But Kermit doesn't know what hard is: it is much, much more difficult to be a Teletubby. This is a fact that you are not likely to hear from the mouth of a Tubby; in fact, the actors--yes, those are real actors inside those bright, baby-shaped alien outfits--are contractually forbidden to talk to their adoring public. "My favorite color is green," says Dipsy, played by John Simmit, rolling his eyes. "That's all I'm allowed to say." And if the Teletubby creators had their way, we might not even know that much. Why the secrecy? "We don't want to destroy the magic," people involved with the show explain again and again, obviously infected by that numbing, Teletubby-like repetition that mesmerizes children. Or, as the show's co-creator Anne Wood says, "We want to preserve the whole reality of the Teletubbies."
Reality is not exactly the first word that springs to mind when thinking of Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. The first television show explicitly designed for the one- to two-year-old set, it centers on the comical activities of four fuzzy creatures who speak in baby talk, eat Tubby Custard ("Tubby Tustard!"), share "big hugs," and have TV antennas on their heads and TV screens on their stomachs that transmit short film clips showing real children. In other words, this is a TV show about infants, for infants, that extols the wonders of, among other things, television. So what? say kids'-TV veteran Wood, 60, and co-creator Andrew Davenport, 33, a trained speech therapist and former performance artist; they insist that Teletubbies helps children acquire language skills. "Children are able to make their own meaning from it," says Wood. "We don't have an adult on there telling them what to think."
Of course, since the target audience does not yet speak, we don't know what they do think--but kids plainly love Teletubbies. About 2 million people in Britain have watched it daily since its launch last year; it has been sold to 22 countries; and since premiering on PBS in April, it has swiftly landed alongside Barney and Sesame Street in the top five of the system's kids' shows.
Occasional British-style tabloid feeding frenzies and endless controversy over its educational merit have left the folks in Teletubbyland--actually six acres of farmland outside Stratford-upon-Avon--more than a little press shy. But TIME was recently permitted a rare look at the filming of two sure-to-be-classic episodes: "Don't Pull That Lever, Dipsy" and "Laa-Laa Has an Orange Ball." As Tubby body parts roll by in wheelbarrows and crew members carefully place live rabbits and racks of fake flowers on the Day-Glo green Home Hill, Davenport cautions, "There's a lot of intervention that happens before it reaches the screen. It's speeded up; it's colored sometimes; the characters are cut to make it look as though they keep their heads on for more than 10 minutes."