We had no idea it was going to be this big. This enthusiastic reception contrasts with the hate campaign that greeted Teletubbies, launched by the same production company, Ragdoll, at the same pre-school audience 10 years earlier. It took Diana's death to get us off the front pages. In the Night Garden reunites Wood with Teletubbies's co-creator Andrew Davenport 42, bright-eyed, shaven-headed, slightly dreamy.
It was Davenport who came up with the concept for Night Garden, designed the characters and the sets, and wrote the music as well as the script, after Wood articulated 'a feeling that we were living in increasingly anxious times for one reason or another - this was five years ago - and this was permeating the world of young parents and their children'. Having joined Ragdoll in , Davenport had worked with Wood on the Bafta-winning Tots TV and Brum before they co-created Teletubbies, the first show to be aimed squarely, and controversially, at pre-schoolers.
Teletubbies took such a stranglehold on the popular imagination that before long it was being spoofed on The Simpsons, South Park and Dr Who. Small children adored this highly coloured quartet of amiable toddler-people.
Their parents, on the other hand, mostly hated it: hated the apparent inanity of the dialogue, the endless repetition, the bland perfection of the grass, the sky and the plastic flowers. The model, pre-Teletubbies, was very much based on the school experience, where the presenter played the part of the playleader and would say things like, "Shall we sing a song about the bus? That's why Teletubbies looked completely different to everything that came before it.
Wood and Davenport feel they've won that argument now, but when devising In the Night Garden they set out to get the adults onside, too. The episodes are all filmed in expensive high-definition; each minute show features 80 to 90 special effects; up to 60 different layers of footage may be used in a single shot - and yet, for all its hi-tech bells and whistles, Night Garden has a reassuring, handmade texture.
Unlike Teletubbies, which featured sentient vacuum cleaners and characters with TV screens on their abdomens, this show doesn't rub our faces in the fact that we are slackly farming our children out to the electric babysitter; instead, it has a faintly folky, storybook quality. The score has a barrel-organ or carousel jauntiness, and sometimes sounds like an old air you once gathered peascods to.
The machinery - the spinning gazebo, the train, the paddle-powered airship - whirrs along at the delicate yet exhilarating pace of clockwork. You can see the stitching in Igglepiggle's blanket; you sense you'd be right that the jerky Pontipines are manipulated by magnets, like the players in an old-fashioned toy theatre. The show's structure is equally parent-friendly. Through its characters, it acknowledges a child's desire to make choices - to noisily slurp a juice, perhaps, or to play the drums at top whack - while gently indicating that some choices are better than others.
And, crucially, the show is founded on the notion that bedtime such a fraught element of family life that Supernanny had to be invented is a time for calmness and comfort, rather than tantrums. Certainly my son's journey upstairs is a less reluctant one because he has enjoyed watching the characters putting themselves to bed, as they do at the end of every episode.
The birds sing, and then the characters go to bed: there's an inevitability about what happens, which I always feel is what you owe children. I've always felt for the child who is still out there playing in the garden when everyone else has gone in. He's not the one who has the most freedom; nobody cared enough to say, "Come on, it's bedtime.
Davenport is less sure of this. Going to sleep, for a lot of children, is not very nice. No one can accompany them there. It's not surprising children resist it. So we give them a thought: they can go to bed in a boat like Igglepiggle, or in a cave like Makka Pakka, or in a bed like Upsy Daisy Ragdoll has a few hundred local families who participate in its Children's Response Unit, allowing the production team insight into the different ways two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds view the world the fours love slapstick and mess, but threes are worried by it , but 'one of Andy's tremendous strengths as a writer is his power of recall,' says Wood.
Igglepiggle falls down and gets a muddy patch on his tummy. He gets the mud everywhere. Funny Noises from the Pinky Ponk.
Upsy Daisy sets up her own special megaphone to sing. Tombliboos Clean Their Teeth. The Tombliboos run around the inside of their bush looking for their toothbrushes. Igglepiggle's Blanket Walks About by Itself Igglepiggle leaves his blanket in a safe place, but when he returns, it is gone.
Pontipine Children in the Tombliboos' Trousers The Pontipines go for a long walk to the Tombliboo house, where the children play a game. Upsy Daisy chooses to sing through her megaphone, and the Pontipines cover their ears.
Playing Hiding with Makka Pakka. The Tombliboos have discovered a new game, hiding in the garden. Where have they gone? A ball bounces around the garden, visiting one character after another. Where Is the Pinky Ponk Going? Everyone in the Night Garden boards the Pinky Ponk for a special journey. Igglepiggle cannot find Upsy Daisy, but then he spots her bed and follows it to her. The Pontipines set out on a walk, but everywhere they go the Wottingers get there first. Makka Pakka's Og-Pog runs away by itself.
Reached by following a magical little, blue star, the Night Garden is a warm and affectionate world which is home to a comical and diverse community of toys, living happily together. I just couldn't imagine him agreeing to say "mikka, makka, moo"," laughs creator Andrew Davenport. It gives the show such weight. He's got a very grandfatherly voice, which really suited what we were looking for and he's an amazing actor.
He doesn't make it twee and that's vital. We took him to lunch expecting to have to do a hard sell but we showed him about 30 seconds of rushes before he said yes.
It's been so wonderful to have him as part of the show. She continues: "In The Night Garden is the first production that Andy and I have made together since Tellytubbies, which was 10 years ago now.
In The Night Garden stems from this anecdotal sharing of people's experience of bringing up children. It's the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed.
Andrew Davenport continues: "In developing the characters I spent a lot of time thinking about my own childhood. When I was very young I used to stay at my grandmother's house. She would play a game with me about walking round the garden like a teddy bear and we would play it again and again. Tall and slim, with cropped hair and a quick laugh, he wears a dark blue shirt and looks as smart and spotless as his studio in London's East End. At his desk sits a keyboard and a phone — he sings into its answering machine if he thinks of a tune while he's out; a piece of software turns it into music.
He quotes Piaget when I ask him to explain the phenomenal success of In the Night Garden, and how it manages to be both soporific and entertaining. Up to a certain age, a child will take hold of a doll and bang it to see what it sounds like.
Then, at a certain point, that doll becomes symbolic. It starts to stand for a person. It's that kind of play In the Night Garden is accessing. And it's that, I think, that is so calming. Before setting off to meet Davenport, I'd asked my daughter if she had a question for Iggle Piggle's daddy.
But he's also, crucially, the only character not in bed at the end. Very often children don't have a proper sense of time.
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