Teach the kids what a nightmare is!

Gone are the days of cute children’s television programs featuring cartoon characters kids could relate to and life-like themes. Programs such as In The Night Garden, Teletubbies and Boobah are nothing short of terrifying – and they’re all brought to you from the crazed mind of Anne Wood.

Call me old fashioned, but these programs strike as creepy and confusing – for me, let alone their pre-school age target market.

Take In The Night Garden, the latest offering from Wood’s team. Featuring Derek Jacobi narrating gibberish for the greater part of the episodes, the show runs for half an hour. It’s hard to engage a toddler for five minutes, let alone 30 – and if they have as much difficulty comprehending the awkward episodes as I do, heaven help them.

It’s the story of a “place that exists between waking and sleeping in a child’s imagination… home to a comical and diverse community of toys, living happily together”. It sounds peachy, but the characters strike you as passive dolls to the narrators will, nodding at his every word – when they’re not having their faces washed by a strange creature, emitting strange noises and running about with no pants on.

Strange noises and pantless, colourful creatures did you say? It’s a popular theme! Narrators whose every word is obeyed? What about the horryifying gibberish languages that run throughout these shows? And their names? One could be forgiven for believing Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po to be cute, but Humbah, Zumbah, Zing Zing Zingbah, Jumbah and Jingbah??

Teletubbies, again, feature a group of wide-eyed, pudgy, colourful creatures. Their friend Noo-Noo the vaccum cleaner, random voice trumpets that pop up eerily when the Teletubbies are out and about, and the televisions that reside in each of the Teletubbies' stomachs were evidently designed to teach kids growing up in world of technological gizmos that machines aren’t scary. That said, the show was linked to the death of a toddler whose life ended trying to hug the television.

And the most terrifying show to grace television, let along children’s television - Boobah - comparable to a bad acid trip. The show sees five Kewpie-headed, gumdrop- shaped creatures flying around and dancing seizure-like, retracting their heads into their bodies and retreating to their “Boohball”, a glowing white ball powered by the laughter of children. Hmm.

To be fair, both Teletubbies and In The Night Garden have won BAFTA awards, and been championed by early childhood education experts. I’m no authority, but I’d prefer to see kids sat in front of Sesame Street.

- Carmen Juarez