The new teletubbies - Zoe Williams on why cult children's TV programmes have lost their magic

Everyone knows The Magic Roundabout was all about drugs. There was a rabbit in it with a guitar. Ermintrude got stuck on top of a washing machine in midcycle (hmm, actually, maybe that was about sex). Phyllida Law, wife of the late Eric Thompson who created it (the English version, anyway), may be very, very clear that it was nothing to do with drugs at all, but there is an unending truth that she cannot deny - it's fun to watch it when you're stoned. It was 20 years before something came along that was equally fun to watch when you're stoned (unless you count melting cheese), and that was Teletubbies. I never got into those creatures, to be honest - I never bought the notion that staggering innovation was involved in giving one of them a handbag when his gender (such as it was) tended to eschew such accessorising. But a lot of people did like them, so their creators' decision to make a whole new bunch - the Boohbahs - is understandable. Children will be pleased, one imagines.

Are we interested in children, however? No, we are not - we are interested in whether these items have anything to offer adults. Ideally, I would have got stoned for this, but I have reached an age where finding soft drugs takes an awfully long time. So I watched Boohbah (ITV) and The Magic Roundabout (BBC) while imagining that I was stoned.

Boohbah is for three- to six-year-olds. (But I never realised that they were so unsophisticated. Jesus, Thomas De Quincey was reading Latin by the age of six. What's gone wrong with us?) A ball of light arrives on earth. It bounces into children. Their joy is unconfined - no one knows why. Maybe they have it mixed up with the Milky Bar Kid. Inside the ball are five Boohbahs, brightly coloured creatures who dance. They make those profoundly irritating squeaky noises that children do, with none of the charming suggestion that they might be striving towards speech. The landscape is a kind of very brightly coloured lunar. It strikes me that if I were stoned, I'd be wishing I had some LSD. There are simply not enough words in this programme. Even if you count "ooh" as a word. Anyway, a vast family then arrives - brother and sister, Mr Man and Mrs Lady, Grandpappy and Grandmummy, and (oh, you guessed it) a dog. They all look like Maureen Lipman, apart from Mr Man, who is carrying a little, ahem, holiday weight.

I'm convinced that the finest research has gone into this programme; that people have sat watching three-year-olds day after day, wondering what rocked their little boats. But shucks, if I have to sit through the Ring Cycle (well, I don't; I never have done; but just imagine) these little critters can sit through 15 minutes a day of entertainment they don't completely understand. Surely? They are kids! They spend their whole lives listening to stuff they don't get. That's how they learn language. This doesn't need saying, but The Magic Roundabout, compared to this, is incredibly sophisticated. It (apparently) catered to the same age group, but has marvellous Dougal-Brian interchanges, recalling the Tony Hancock/Sid James golden years. Cannon appear, talk knowledgeably about the Battle of Waterloo, then disappear again. It is really good. I bet Thomas De Quincey would have liked it. We are, without doubt, storing up for ourselves a generation of twerps who can't concentrate on anything unless its meaning is immediately transparent, who hate ambiguity and complexity, whose sensibility runs counter to all the impulses behind great art. And we are leaving an older generation, in the 13-25 range, with nothing to watch at all while they take their drugs. They are probably stuck with The Weakest Link. I bet Anne Robinson scares the bejesus out of them.

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian

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