Creating Teletubbies

It’s 1994 and the BBC is looking for a brand-new children’s TV series. TV producer Anne Wood decides she’s going to make a show aimed at an audience that’s never had programmes made for it before – two and three-year-olds. She tells Melanie Stewart-Smith the fascinating story of how spacemen and technology inspired the creation of one of the most popular kids TV shows of all time, Teletubbies. (Photo: Teletubbies. Credit: Ragdoll Productions for the BBC/Wildbrain)

Om Podcasten

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest, the disastrous D-Day rehearsal, and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.