Tonight:
4°c
If you have a toddler, you have no choice. You're going to be watching more Waybuloo than anything else. Forget The Wire.
This is the Teletubbies Reloaded, basically. Instead of Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky-Winky, we get the Piplings. The same, only ruthlessly re-engineered to hit the winsomeness button even harder.
Yojojo is brown, vaguely monkeylike; Nok Tok is blue, supposedly bearish. Both are boys; Lau Lau is purple, rabbity; De Li is pink, a fey kitty. Both are girls. Got that? You will have, after the first few months, believe me.
They have huge heads with vast ET-style eyes. Save for clownishly large feet, bodies are vestigial appendages. They bound round a paradise garden home, “Nara”, and when happy, feel “Buloo” and float up, eyes closed in ecstasy.
They speak in sickly-sweet childish voices. They love strawberries. Into Nara come some real tots, branded, I regret to say, Cheebies. There are three white, one black, one Indian, one Chinese, in the first episode.
They're a desperate lot of dogooders, one and all, both Piplings and Cheebies.
Two main activities featured every time (100 episodes commissioned already) are “Peepa!”, aka hide-and-seek, and “yogo”, which is, believe it or not, yoga. Piplings and the Cheebies adopt surprisingly ambitious yoga postures in a garden hippyishly bedecked with windchimes and crystals.
It's a shameless attempt to get our pre-schoolers off their arses.
The stories are more didactic than any Victorian children's literature. In episode one, Yojojo and Nok Tok blow a trumpet so loudly they scare the others, who plead with them to play more quietly.
A familiar inner-city scenario. So they pick out a pretty tune, ever so gently, instead of resorting to knife crime.
Waybuloo starts on CBeebies at 9.10am tomorrow.
Reader views (1)
It's Peeka, not Peepa, but let us not get technical here. I am surprised at the thinking that these yoga moves are ambitious - far from it. My son who has just turned 2, loves going "yogo" with the Piplings and has shown me a fair few positions!
Sickly-sweet, yes definitely, but relaxes a hyper-animal, I mean child, in seconds. Also with children enrolling into yoga all around the country as a result of it, I fail to see how this programme can be anything other than a brilliant innovation.
- Marie, Ilkeston, Derbyshire, UK, 08/09/2009 07:53
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