It is 7 a.m. on April 6 and Britain's latest television export is making its B.C. debut on KCTS Channel 9, Seattle's PBS affiliate. This is no Masterpiece Theatre, however. As the opening voice-over intones "Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to play," the camera zooms in on the stars of the show, four psychedelic-coloured alien babies with televisions in their stomachs, antennae on their heads, glazed smiles on their faces and vacuous looks in their eyes.

Five minutes on, it becomes clear that the show contains little coherent dialogue, much less a story line. The Teletubbies—Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po—romp in a computer-generated pasture full of bunnies and deer, accompanied by their nozzle-nosed vacuum-cleaner friend Noo-Noo who mischievously sucks on everything in sight; they are watched over by a smiling sun with the beatific face of a real baby. The foursome's hugging and infantile gurgling are interrupted only by the periodic appearance of music-blaring loudspeakers, and a pinwheel that spins to signal a transmission is about to begin on the creatures' stomachs. The Teletubbies break up their group-hugs long enough to gaze transfixed at their navel-telecast of a nursery rhyme, then shout "Again, again!"—one of their few recognizable words—whereupon the telecast is repeated.

The Teletubbies have been described by one critic as a cross between Care Bears on a hippie commune and Ewoks after a lobotomy. The first children's television show specifically targeted to one- and two-year-old viewers, it has become as controversial internationally as it is wildly popular in its native Britain. Since Teletubbies made its BBC debut in the spring of 1997, Britons have bought $50 million worth of Tubby merchandising. The ecstasy-fuelled rave crowd has adopted the catatonic furballs as honorary mascots, and a recording of their anthem "Say Eh-oh" went straight to number one in the pop music charts. Perhaps most significant, chimpanzees at the London Zoo reportedly developed an instant Teletubbie addiction during an experiment on the effects of television-viewing.

So popular has the show grown that the BBC provoked a public outcry last July when it sacked Dave Thompson, the Shakespearean actor who played Tinky Winky, after it was disclosed that he had danced in public wearing only a balloon. Tinky Winky has become something of a gay icon because of his penchant for carrying a red patent-leather purse. The show's creators insist the purse is an innocent reflection of children's attachment to comforting objects that are eventually outgrown, but homosexual Village Voice columnist Michael Musto declared that Tinky Winky is out and proud. "It's a great message to kids—not only that it's okay to be gay, but the importance of being well accessorized."

More controversial is the philosophy of childhood development underlying the show. Former British education minister Stephen Byers accused it of "dumbing down" television. At a children's television summit in London last month, Patricia Edgar, head of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, called Teletubbies "regressive for young children," while Ada Haug, director of children's programming for Norway's NRK Network, disparaged it as the most market-driven children's show she had ever seen. "I get this creepy feeling it's very good for making lots of money," she opined.

With the show now airing in Canada (both TV Ontario and Alberta's Access TV began airing it last week), the prospect of pre-verbal youngsters being targeted by toy manufacturers, not to mention being encouraged to watch television at such a tender age, has sparked heated debate among childhood psychologists. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of educational television are troubled by the idea of a show directed at one- and two-year-old viewers, regardless of its merits.

Yet some critics fear that the controversy over programming for infants misses the broader issue of television's negative effects on all children. "We've hit a saturation point where we have become so desensitized to the presence of this medium in our homes that we only get upset when it targets one- and two-year-olds," says Shari Graydon of Vancouver, president of Media Watch. "Part of my concern is the hypocrisy in our reaction to this show relative to every other piece of crap on the tube."

As the Teletubbies furor evolves into a debate on the role and merits of educational television, a somewhat elastic concept that some have dismissed as oxymoronic, the show's promoters say critics are missing the point: 99% of North American households have television and children are already watching it for many hours a week. In the absence of age appropriate programming, infants will be subjected to shows intended for older audiences with a too-advanced educational component—or none at all, says Frances James, TV Ontario's director of children programming, who worked for over a year to acquire Teletubbies.

"It is something for parents to decide, and whether a one- or two-year-old should be watching TV is indeed a concern," says Ms. James. "The fact is, many do. We're not saying we encourage kids to watch TV. But we're saying if they are watching, let's give them something good."

Some have argued that Teletubbies is not suitable for any age. Dubbed by the London Independent as "the psychedelic spawn of Satan," the show has been excoriated for infantile dialogue, repetition and surreal characters and staging that confound the line between what is real and imaginary.

Teletubbies creator Anne Wood, the 60-year-old founder of Ragdoll Productions whose other series include Tots TV, has argued that the show is based on extensive research on and current theories of how young children learn. Most child development experts regard baby talk and repetition as crucially important techniques in the acquisition of language, she contends.

PBS director of children's programming Anne Cahn justifies the creatures' robotic nature, and the juxtaposition of real animals with magical gadgetry, as reflecting the technological age in which today's children are growing up. The telly-tummied babies socialize children to the global village. "We're preparing them for interactive use of media that will be their world when they grow up," she says.

Tubby-haters are accustomed to use the words "creepy" and "sinister" to describe the quartet. According to Ms. Wood, this reaction fails to appreciate the struggle of children to make sense of the world. "If you try and think back to how you felt when you were two, and ask 'If I were in the world now, what would I think about it?' I'd think it was bizarre. You know, voices coming out of the wall at you, little magic boxes in the corner that do things...The thing about little children is they live in the same world as the rest of us but they perceive it differently."

Alan Mirabelli, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa, is a firm advocate of educational television, and believes Teletubbies passes the test. He says good television helps children understand the planet and their place in it, and motivates them to learn more by talking to others or reading books. For example, he argues, television can introduce children to foreign countries they would otherwise not see, inspiring them to take an interest in their own country and how it relates to others.

Teletubbies both informs and involves young viewers by communicating to them on their own level, says Mr. Mirabelli. He finds it ironic that critics of educational television who fault shows like Sesame Street for reducing learning to a series of music video-styled visual bites have jumped on the anti-tubby bandwagon. "It's paced at a very gentle level," he says. "Most TV is comprised of rapid-paced segments, jazzed up and full of production values, whereas children say, 'Just tell us a story.'"

Kealy Wilkinson, national director of the Alliance for Children and Television of Toronto, responds that the problem with Teletubbies is that it is oversimplified. While she too is an advocate of educational television, she argues that infants lack the cognitive ability to even distinguish between regular programming and commercials, much less fact and fantasy. Because there is no language in Teletubbies, little knowledge is being imparted, she reasons. "It's just sound and movement, really. They aren't going to learn anything. It's just entertainment, not education."

Ms. Wilkinson's concern is that in the absence of any educational good, the show becomes little more than a marketing vehicle, and she questions the ethics of selling to children barely out of the womb. She notes that the U.S. distributor of Teletubbies, Itsy Bitsy Entertainment Co. of New York, has spent $1 million promoting the show and recently signed a contract with Hasbro Toys to release an entire line of tubby toys, pyjamas and underwear this fall. "This is a show that is one long commercial, the presentation of a world that is so bizarre and spaced out that no infant would associate it with reality," she charges.

That said, Ms. Wilkinson reckons Teletubbies is otherwise harmless from an entertainment standpoint. Not so, counters Dorothy Singer, co-director of Yale University's Family Television Research Centre. The author of several books on child development, she says the show's use of baby talk is not only ineffective but potentially detrimental to speech development. "Everything I've read says you talk to children in your own language, not theirs," she says, noting that a key objective of education is to model and instill a higher level of knowledge. "The danger is that you perpetuate that talk," she warns.

Prof. Singer also rejects PBS' assertion that infants must be introduced to technology; she argues that media exposure at that early age stifles imagination and creativity. "I don't believe one-year-olds should be watching TV at all," she declares. "To say many do is taking the easy way out. At that age, children can learn as much from interacting with mom for a half-hour as they can from watching TV."

But Media Watch's Ms. Graydon responds that these same criticisms could be applied to allegedly educational shows that target older children. Given that even the most respected children's programs have a strong entertainment component, all end up subtly promoting the same underlying Teletubbie messages of media dependence and consumerism—particularly shows like Sesame Street and Barney and Friends that have generated billions of dollars in merchandise. That televised depictions of violence against animals routinely result in more calls of protest to television stations than depictions of violence against people leads Ms. Graydon to conclude that parents have become wholly desensitized to television's negative values. "Because we see it so often, we get used to it," she says.

Ms. Graydon argues that allowing children to passively view television, thereby taking them away from activities where they learn and develop, is harmful at any age. "It's the displacement factor," says Ms. Graydon. "The same is just as true for four- and five-year-olds, and even adults."

"The controversy over [Teletubbies] points to a much bigger problem," says Ms. Graydon, specifically the increasing number of parents who have abdicated their responsibility for what their offspring see on television. In response to what they consider immoral programing, a small but increasing number of parents is opting to remove the box from their homes (see story, below). Ms. Graydon believes a more practical approach is to watch TV with children; she believes television can indeed be educational so long as families discuss what they have seen and so long as children understand that parents, not the tube, set rules and establish values.

However, where Ms. Graydon (and others) is concerned primarily with content, others argue that the medium itself is destructive, no matter how ostensibly well-intentioned and educational. If as Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message," they argue that a half-century of television saturation has resulted in a Beavis and Butthead world; generations of ignorant, decadent underachievers.

"We're setting up a fundamental confusion between education and entertainment," says Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Seattle, president of Toward Tradition and host of a nationally syndicated U.S. radio show. "There are certain things you have to master that are not fun—there is no fun way of memorizing multiplication tables or poetry. The problem with educational TV is that no teacher can ever be as exciting as a TV show. We're creating the mistaken notion that everything can be fun." The result, says Rabbi Lapin, is an attitude that demands instant gratification and fosters academic failure.

University of B.C. psychologist Tannis MacBeth, an expert on the effects of television on learning, agrees that it dumbs down our children. The editor of Tuning In to Young Viewers, she conducted research on the impact of the introduction of television on three northern Canadian communities in the early 1970s. At the time, the first had no access to television because of its remote location; the second received CBC only; and the third had full television service. Not only were creativity, attention span and reading skills significantly lower among residents in the fully-served community, but incidents of physical aggression were higher. Moreover, social interaction and participation in community activities such as amateur sport and local politics were significantly higher in the TV-free zone.

Still, Prof. MacBeth rejects Rabbi Lapin's assertion that educational TV is a contradiction in terms. "The bottom line is that programming intended to be educational has been shown to have positive effects," she says, citing Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as an example of a show that successfully instills the importance of such "pro-social" characteristics as sharing and cooperation.

Rabbi Lapin remains unconvinced. He notes that after passage of the U.S. Children's Television Act in 1990, requiring stations to prove they were providing educational programming to young viewers, most simply subverted the law by claiming their old shows had newfound educational value. For example, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers taught "the rewards of team efforts," while a cartoon featuring "Good-doer Bucky fighting off evil toads from his ship" addressed issues of "social consciousness and responsibility."

Rabbi Lapin's contends that, given enough effort, "pro-social" values can be read in to any show, no matter how dubious. "The fundamentals of education have to do with modifying not only what the student knows, but what the student is," he says. "TV can certainly impart data. But it lacks the capacity to extract commitment and performance. I've got nothing against TV as entertainment and if you want to use it as a babysitter that's up to you. But at least have the honesty and the guts to admit that you're not doing any good for your child."

—Dave Cunningham

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