As a new parent paying serious attention to CBeebies for the first time, you may well find yourself starting with In The Night Garden.  Not only is it a global success, but it’s aimed at the very youngest of children.

Your initial reaction is likely to be horror at the prospect of watching this on a regular basis.  Here is the plot of a fairly typical episode of In The Night Garden: Makka Pakka washes the faces of the Pontipines, who are small, followed by the faces of the Haahoos, who are big.  Here is the plot of another fairly typical episode of In The Night Garden: The Tombliboos’ trousers fall down a lot.  The Tombliboos love their Tombliboo trousers.  Isn’t that a pip?

At first glance, In The Night Garden can come across as plotless meandering.  And often it is, since it’s aimed at children so young that they’re still learning the basic building blocks of visual storytelling.  Every episode of the show ends with one of the regular characters going to bed and being told a “story” by the narrator, which is always a recap of the episode in rudimentary animation.  Often, the show seems to be engaged in seeing how far back you can pare a narrative before it ceases to be a story at all.  The answer, frequently, is “not this far”.

The other thing that is obvious at an early stage is the sheer oddness of the show.  Ostensibly, the Night Garden is supposed to be a place between waking and sleep, though this isn’t exactly spelled out explicitly in the programme itself.  Pitched at an audience too young to really understand any sort of conventional plot, the show instead offers a cast of familiar characters defined not so much by personalities as by signature traits.  Nobody has any emotional range beyond vague concern at mislaying their signature possessions.  Virtually everyone has their own signature song which the narrator performs for them (the Pontipines don’t, but have an elaborate “leaving the house” routine); most characters can only say their own names and “Pip pip onk onk”, which means goodbye.

Some of those character traits are pretty normal, if you take the characters to be basically ambulatory toys.  Iggle Piggle likes his blanket and is easily panicked.  Upsy Daisy likes to sing and dance.  The Pontipines are a tiny family living in a tiny house.   The Ball is just a ball.  More curious are the Tombliboos, a trio who look like a cross between Frank Sidebottom and a pack of Refreshers, who play horrific atonal “music”, and who have a perennial difficulty with waistband tailoring.  Then there’s Makka Pakka, who lives in a cave, whose only apparent interests are stone-polishing and face-washing, and who goes to sleep at night hugging a rock as if it was a teddy bear.  And the Haahoos, giant grinning inflatables who the narrator persistently treats as characters, but which sure look like giant grinning inflatables.

Somewhere around this point you may be inclined to check Wikipedia and find out how many episodes of this thing there are.  The answer is one hundred.  Jesus.  There’s fifty hours of it.

As time goes on, you realise that while most things in the show are spelled out slowly and painstakingly, some are clearly being withheld, or are just plain odd.  The opening credits and the closing wind-down sequence clearly imply that Iggle Piggle (uniquely) is not a resident of the Night Garden, but visits it when he falls asleep – he’s shown falling asleep in his tiny boat at the start, and he’s the one character who has nowhere to go to sleep at the end – but the narrator never actually explains this.  The Wottingers and the Haahoos are never going to get an episode of their own.  The coloured birds who serve as scene transitions are left for parents to teach numbers and colours with, unprompted by the show.  The Pontipines’ house has a bell on it that summons them home for no discernible reason.  The two vehicles – the Ninky Nonk and Pinky Ponk – are deliberately filmed without any consistency in their scale relative to the characters, with no explanation.  And why is Iggle Piggle’s song so persistently out of time with the music?  It’s clearly a deliberate choice.  But why?

Somewhere around this point you will have the horrible realisation that you’ve seen this episode before.  How can that be?  Weren’t there 100 episodes?  But In The Night Garden airs daily, which means it cycles through those 100 episodes roughly four times a year.  This is not a problem for the very young; they develop so much in those three months that it’s genuinely a different experience for them the same time round, and besides, any familiarity may actually be a boon for them.  It is more of a challenge for the adults.

In The Night Garden is one of CBeebies’ flagship shows, and the sort of thing that, in a prior generation, would have bemused an appreciative audience of dazed mid-morning students, just as Teletubbies did in the 1990s.  This is not a coincidence.  Night Garden was created by Andrew Davenport, who was also co-creator of Teletubbies along with Anne Wood.  He wrote all 100 episodes, together with all the music.  And there are very obvious similarities between the two shows, both of which use actors in live action costumes to depict babbling childlike characters in a bucolic landscape.

But a major point of difference between the two shows is that Night Garden is designed to air at the end of the CBeebies schedule, and prime its audience for bed.  Yes, there are some hyperactive episodes in there, but the extended wind down sequence at the end of every episode attempts to cancel that out.  Actually, the show no longer airs quite at the end of the schedule – it’s followed by a ten minute bedtime story slot – but it’s very close.  And so it’s a version of the format that couldn’t have been done on the traditional children’s slots on BBC1 and 2.

In The Night Garden is, in fact, an exercise in the sustained creation of an aesthetic.  There are no guest characters; there are no guest locations.  Every episode is based on finding new combinations of a very limited palette of familiar elements.  Once the tiny viewers have oriented themselves to the show, they’re always presented with things they recognise.  And those elements are then used to get across such ideas as “up and down”, “over and under”, “loud and quiet”, “alone and together”, and “the Tombliboos’ trousers have fallen down again”.

A lot of children’s TV has an obvious eye on the adult audience.  That’s understandable, since the reality of pre-school TV is that a substantial proportion of the audience is in fact adults.  The rest of the viewers are too young to be left unattended.  Going forward, we’ll see shows which try, with varying degrees of success, either to entertain the adults on the side, or to find things which are genuinely entertaining to adults and children alike.

In The Night Garden is not one of those shows.  With rare exceptions – mostly involving Mr and Mrs Pontipine and their perennial inability to go for a walk without losing the children and flying into a panic that the narrator entirely ignores – In The Night Garden is completely unconcerned with entertaining the adult audience.  It is artistically uncompromising.

Over time – and as you start to realise that the rest of pre-school TV isn’t going to be like this – the format develops a strange fascination.  You start to get sucked in.  You are able to remember which Tombliboo is which.  You begin to recognise the stock footage well enough to realise just how they got 100 episodes out of this.  Establishing sequences are reused with abandon.  And it’s easy to see how episodes have been padded out to their running time.  Got a few seconds to fill?  Throw in the blossom footage.  A bit longer?  A particularly elaborate version of the Gathering of the Pontipines .  Longer still?  Well, the “go to bed” routines that lead into the story recap are designed so that they can be joined in progress whenever the edit requires – if you see a version where Upsy Daisy is chasing her bed for ever, or Makka Pakka carefully puts his trolley back in the garage, or god help us the Tombliboos clean their teeth, then you’re coming in right at the start, and this episode must have run really short.  Oh, and often everyone gathers at the gazebo to do a dance before bedtime; that’s the same footage in virtually every episode where it appears.

(Plus, of course, the opening credits are long and the wind-down sequence is lengthy, and they’re the same in every episode – but this sort of lengthy tone-setting and sign-off is par for the course in children’s TV for creative reasons quite aside from its budgetary advantages.)

You start to look at the credits.  How did they get Derek Jacobi as the narrator for this?  His gentle, reassuring tones are perfect, but adults can have hours of diversion picturing the classically trained actor in a recording booth peering quizzically at the script.  In fact, he will turn out to be only the first of the unlikely names to be found in the CBeebies credits.  Why are two people credited with playing Tombliboo Ooo?  Ah, it’s because Isaac Blake quit during the production and unsuccessfully sued for unfair dismissal.  (Oddly, both Blake and his replacement Holly Denoon are credited for every episode – presumably each of them appears in at least some of the commonly used stock footage.)

Articles like that lead you, in turn, to a newfound appreciation of the practical difficulties of actually performing in these shows, because apparently those costumes have no eye holes, and the actors have to rely on video screens inside the head, which aren’t even necessarily showing their characters’ view.   At this point, pretty much anything beyond walking into shot starts to look a lot more impressive.  Whoever decided that Makka Pakka, in his particularly restrictive costume, should have to spin around during his opening dance was clearly some sort of bastard – and they must have had a hell of a time filming it, because even one of the stock versions of his intro, used in episode after episode, has him visibly staggering to retain his balance.  Only if you’re looking for it, mind you.  But after a while you’ll be looking for these things.

So while In The Night Garden may not be entertaining for adults as such, that doesn’t stop it offering plenty of fascination in its way.  And of course, if it’s working, you should find yourself watching it with a fascinated child taking his first steps into understanding visual storytelling.  That goes a long way in itself.  But Night Garden is an extreme case of downplaying character and story in favour of a pure aesthetic vision.  It’s not entirely alone in taking this approach – Baby Jake looks like a fever dream on first viewing – but it’s at the far end of the spectrum.

Next time, a more conventional approach: Waybuloo.