Nikky Smedley from Ilmington talks about her life in the Teletubbies as Laa-Laa
WHEN the Teletubbies bounced onto our TV screens 25 years ago, no one had seen anything quite like it. Four luridly-bright blobby characters with smiley faces, aerials on their heads and TVs on their tummies giggled and rolled their way around ‘Teletubbyland’.
The nation’s three-year-olds lapped it up and it went on to become a massive hit for the BBC, topping three billion views and broadcast across 120 countries in 45 languages.
The only thing any self-respecting toddler wanted for Christmas 1997, the year it launched, was a Teletubby toy and this sparked a nationwide frenzy that saw shops selling out and desperate parents driving miles to track one down.
Performer and writer Nikky Smedley, who lives in Ilmington, knows exactly what it was like to be at the centre of that whirlwind, as she played Laa-Laa, aka ‘the yellow one’.
Her memoir, on sale next month, charts the six years she spent as part of the cast. Over the Hills and Far Away recounts how she and the other three Teletubby actors plus the 45-strong crew spent huge chunks of time at Sweet Knowle Farm in Wimpstone, between Stratford and Shipston, which was the filming location for the series between 1996 and 2001.
When she landed the role of Laa-Laa, Nikky was already a professional actress and dancer, running her own dance company.
“I’d reached the ripe old age of 34 and it was getting harder to dance,” she said. “Every time I injured myself, it took longer to heal, and I could feel my star waning.”
She added: “I was also fed up with being incredibly poor.”
Determined to find a non-dancing role, Nikky put herself forward to be one of the Christmas elves at both Harrods and Selfridges.
She recalled: “I even wrote myself what I thought were witty reviews of myself as the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy, but they just thought I was insane.”
Then “a miracle” happened when she spotted a cryptic advert in actors’ newspaper The Stage. A children’s TV production company was looking for actors, and it added ‘people with unusual backgrounds and personalities’ were particularly welcome.
“It sounded like they were looking for funny people,” Nikky added.
After beating hundreds of other hopefuls to secure an audition where she’d had to perform a three-minute performance piece for three-year-olds plus a comedic piece for adults, she was pleased and intrigued to be called back for another audition.
It was then she met producer Anne Wood, head of independent production company, Stratford-based Ragdoll, and co-creator of Teletubbies.
Anne, who had already chalked-up successes with children’s series Tots TV and Rosie & Jim, had a clear vision of what her latest project needed to be.
“She explained what she wanted to do, and I thought she was a genius – I really wanted to work for her,” Nikky said. “Not only did she absolutely nail an untapped niche in the market but she had so much skill and integrity.”
Once she’d landed the part, Nikky found herself swept up in a gruelling filming schedule that ran from 8am to 6pm, five days a week. All four actors playing Teletubbies needed to stay in costume for several hours at a stretch.
Nikky recalls a time she was in her Laa-Laa outfit and inside the temperature hit 102F (38.8C).
She and the other three actors who played Tinky Winky, Dipsy and Po – Dave Thompson, John Simmit, and Pui Fan Lee – bonded and became “a strong team”.
If one of them needed to be helped out of their suit because they were too hot, or needed the toilet, they’d all ask to break, so it wasn’t awkward for one to disrupt filming, Nikky explained.
“Our dressers were amazing,” she said. “You were helpless once you were in the suit, so they’d feed us water through a straw and wipe our faces with damp towels to cool us down. They’d be running up and down those Teletubby hills after us all day, every day.”
The camaraderie on set wasn’t only between the actors but also the 40 plus crew.
“It was a point of honour to make the crew laugh,” Nikky recalled.
All four were sitting around the table in the Tubby den ready to film ‘Tubby toast’ time – the only thing the characters ate was toast and pink custard – with three pieces of ‘toast’ when Dipsy, aka John Simmit suddenly leapt up and threw himself onto Simon Shelton, who’d by then taken over the role of Tinky Winky. The two Teletubbies ended up rolling around on the floor fighting over the fake piece of toast, sending the crew into hysterics.
“I’m proud of the fact that we worked together for six years and never had a big falling out and not just us Teletubbies, I mean the whole team,” she said.
Despite its huge, international success, the show didn’t get off to the smoothest of starts. It was criticised for its strange astro-turf covered set, shower-head style loudspeakers that poked-up from the ground like submarine periscopes.
And child development experts complained that the Teletubby characters never spoke in full words or sentences but used baby talk such as ‘Eh-Oh’ for ‘hello’.
The Teletubbies shared their strange land with a robot vacuum cleaner called Noo Noo and several live rabbits.
“That was part of the cleverness of the show,” Nikky explained.
Since the Teletubbies were 6ft 7in to 7ft 11in tall when in costume, to make them look small and cute, everything around them needed to be bigger.
So the cute-looking bunnies, housed in a hutch on the edge of Teletubby land, were the giant Flemish variety weighing-in at around 22kg each. A full-time minder was employed to carry them on and off set, as and when needed.
“They were huge!” Nikky exclaims.
Once Teletubbies ended in 2001, Nikky’s career continued to flourish and she went to work behind the scenes in children’s TV for another decade – directing, choreographing, writing and producing on series such as ITV’s Boohbah and CBeebies’ In the Night Garden.
She says she will be forever grateful to Anne who “saw something in me and told me she thought I could go on working in this field”.
As she became more interested in young children’s education, she gained qualifications around creative teaching and learning and wrote a book on the subject.
“It’s all about how you make a meaningful connection with youngsters,” she explained.
Now with her 60th birthday coming up in a few months’ time, she is still touring and performing her one-woman show.
When Covid brought production and acting work to a shuddering halt, she says “it was terrifying”.
But having always planned to write a memoir, she took the opportunity to sit down and start typing.
As for the location where all those Teletubby series were filmed all those years ago, it’s now underwater, as the owners of Sweet Knowle Farm flooded it after becoming fed up of tourists wandering onto their estate to glimpse Teletubbyland.
But although that physical element may have disappeared forever, the Teletubby magic transformed Nikky’s career both in terms of success and confidence.
“Afterall, once you’ve committed to be a giant, hairy toddler, nothing can embarrass you,” she quipped.
n Over the Hills and Far Away: My Life as a Teletubby by Nikky Smedley will be published on 11th August by Sandstone Press.