© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Familiar aliens: Teletubbies and postmodern childhood
Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading. He has written and edited several books about television, film and media, and specializes in the history and aesthetics of British television drama. He is currently leading a research project on the relationships between British television drama and acquired US programmes
This article analyzes the British preschool children's television programme Teletubbies, showing how its aesthetic engages in a dialogue with theoretical relationships between postmodernism and childhood outlined in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. Just as, for Lyotard, the postmodern has the retrospective temporality of a future anterior tense, the concept of childhood is also necessarily retrospective and established by adults. Thus childhood is necessarily ‘other’ but also familiar and apparently knowable. The visual appearance of the Teletubbies, their environment, the events that take place in Teletubbyland, and the programme's production history demonstrate how the Teletubbies are represented both as non-human alien creatures and also as recognizably childlike. Teletubbies is reflexive and intertexual, with numerous references to broadcasting, communication and storytelling. The programme's textuality is therefore engaged in a dialogue with understandings of television as a medium, and the ways that television designed for children and representing childhood has been made. The article argues that television itself is rendered familiar by Teletubbies but is also an ‘other’ to childhood because of its address to childhood as something to be shaped and understood from outside. Teletubbies therefore destabilizes categories including childhood, adulthood, human, alien, and the inside and outside of television textuality.