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Ten minutes? The Teletubbies should be so lucky. A casual stroll through the grounds will usually turn up at least one sweaty Tubby slumped over his tea or reclining in a Tubby bed inside the Tubbytronic Superdome, their spaceship-like home. Though onscreen the Fab Four appear to be a baby-friendly size, in "person" they are gargantuan, bigger than Barney, bigger even than Big Bird. Po, the smallest, is 6 ft. 6 in., while Tinky Winky looms around 10 ft. tall. This makes for a costume that weighs more than 30 lbs. And if the performers, who see and breathe through the mouth holes, keep their heads on too long, there is a danger of carbon-dioxide buildup. Surely a better head could be designed? "The artists can cope with it the way it is," says production manager Nick Kirkpatrick.
Just barely. During the climactic scene in "Laa-Laa Has an Orange Ball," Laa-Laa (played by Nikky Smedley) doodles along singing her little song, "La la la la la." Upon spying an enormous orange ball, she halts in astonishment, picks it up, bounces it a few times, then throws it into the air Mary Tyler Moore-style. The sequence takes maybe 30 sec., but the moment Laa-Laa finishes, someone cries "Heads off!" and a stool is thrust under her while her dresser races over to whip the yellow head off, revealing the petite Smedley sweating and gasping as though she has run a marathon. "Doing the voices, that's good fun," Smedley says, as an unamused publicist hovers. "The costume bit is quite hard." She gulps some water. "We have physiotherapy every week, thank God." So is this a good job? Says a staff member: "If you spent your life anonymous, inside a suit, sweating your guts out, how do you think it feels?"
To match the scale of the Teletubbies, everything else on the set is also bizarrely off-size, including the rabbits seen in many scenes, which are bred especially for the show. The size of small sheep, the rabbits are pretty docile--except when they start "bonking" on-camera, their breeder admits. "Oh, don't write that!" she wails. "I'll lose my job." As Kenn Viselman, president of the Itsy Bitsy Entertainment Co., which is marketing the show in the U.S., puts it, "Everything about it is choreographed: the number of flowers on that hill, the ply on their fur. They fired an actor because he decided to fall off the chair more than they wanted him to."
The precise choreography is, however, essential. Long before anyone knew the show would be a hit, Wood and her company, Ragdoll Productions, put up more than three-quarters of a million dollars to build Home Hill, with the BBC kicking in millions more. And Ragdoll has promised the BBC a staggering 260 episodes--nearly 100 a year.
All this intensive, 11-hour-a-day labor has a tremendous potential payoff, not only for Wood and Ragdoll but also for PBS, which has a piece of the spin-off action that Viselman estimates could be worth some $2 billion in retail sales. What does Viselman, who merchandised Thomas the Tank Engine, have planned? In addition to assorted dolls, expect to see Tubby slippers, backpacks, puzzles, videos, pajamas, books, board games, baby bottles, cups, key chains, stacking toys and, as the Tubbies would say, "Again, again!"