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Imagination rules over reason in the BBC’s bedtime CBeebies hit In the Night Garden.

A large blue teddy-like creature throws himself on his back and squeaks. A colourful, rambling, trundley train with house-shaped carriages drives up and down a tree trunk. Ten peg-doll characters jump in and out of a teeny-tiny hole. These are the seemingly random events that connect with little narrative to create the dreamy, imaginative woodland world of In the Night Garden, voiced almost entirely by Derek Jacobi.

In March 2007, the first of 100 episodes of In the Night Garden was broadcast on the BBC children’s channel, CBeebies. With a budget of £14.5m from the BBC, the Ragdoll production company set about following up its major success of the Teletubbies and has produced a viewer-grabbing bedtime programme for one-to-four-year-olds.

Getting children to bed

The aim was to assist parents with the tricky task of getting their children to bed at a reasonable hour. At 30 minutes an episode, it is the longest programme on CBeebies and is screened between 6.20-6.50 pm every evening. It is designed to be a calming, restful influence on children and is meant to emulate the dreamlike state between wakefulness and sleep. Co-creator Anne Wood stated: ‘We became very aware of the anxiety surrounding the care of young children which manifested itself in all kind of directions — but the one big subject that came up again and again was bedtime. It’s the classic time for tension between children who want to stay up and parents who want them to go to bed... so this is a programme about calming things down whereas most children’s TV is about gee-ing everything up!’

Secure and dreamy

It starts with the shot of a child’s palm being stroked ‘round and round the garden’ by a parent’s finger (a different child each episode), suggesting the secure and dreamy drifting off to sleep that a child loves to experience. ‘We wanted to explore the difference between being asleep and being awake from a child’s point of view, the difference between closing your eyes and pretending to be asleep and closing your eyes and sleeping’, said Wood.

It then cuts to a small wooden boat on a night time sea which sails off to the garden carrying Iggle Piggle, the programme’s main character, in the grip of semi-somnolent imaginings. He is the one who links the ‘real world’ to the world of the imagination. He is not the only one who resembles a toy; the doll Upsy Daisy, the tiny Pontipines, the stone-loving Makka Pakka and the three identical Tombliboos all have the large eyes and round figures most popular with small children.

Central questions

Most parents and carers who have sat, baffled, through many a Night Garden episode have a few central questions. Why does Makka Pakka go to sleep cuddling a stone? Who are the blue family living next to the Pontipines? Are the Pinky-Ponk’s windy noises meant to be amusing?

‘Too many questions!’ say the programme’s writers. A child doesn’t ask the questions that an adult does and doesn’t view it in the same way. It is not meant to be educational in the same way as the rest of the CBeebies programming, which promotes healthy eating, exercise, environmental concerns, loving relationships, maths, science, wordplay and stable communities throughout its clever and savvy scheduling. No! In the Night Garden is meant to connect with its target audience at their most basic level of understanding. It plays with dolls and teddies coming to life, characterised by their simple, repeated phrases and actions that are familiar and accessible, free from the demands of pushy parents trying to get them to put their shoes on or write their name.

Dangerous?

But isn’t it dangerous to thrust children into the dreamy imaginings of their imagination at a time of day when they are most susceptible to suggestion?

Is the programme useful to parents trying to provide a Christian worldview for their children? Ideologically speaking, the Night Garden world seems to be a safe, multicultural, stable, affectionate, curious, community-based place which is strongly moral. Some bloggers have even tried to provide a Christian reading with Iggle Piggle as a kind of Jesus crossing the ‘sea’ of faith between concrete experience and the spiritual. Indeed, In the Night Garden promotes a mysterious, imaginative scenario that an atheist naturalist might find problematic due to its non-literal reading of spatial relationships (everything is different sizes and doesn’t always make sense).

No substitute

Yet secular television is clearly no substitute for Bible stories and prayer times with small children at bedtime, which crucially teach them the central importance of a relationship with their creator God through Jesus. However, In the Night Garden has given me a gradual set of tutorials on how the toddler’s mind is stimulated and has helped me to teach my children the Bible in a more age-specific way. This is probably totally obvious to everyone else, but when I’m bashing through a Bible story, being interrupted every three seconds by irrelevant observations, I now have more confidence to stop and see the story from their point of view. When they pray and pick on a trivial event to thank God for, I can see the world through their eyes rather than imposing my understanding of the day onto them. Having said all that, I’m still driven bonkers by Makka Pakka’s trolley Og Pog which has unbearably squeaky wheels and seems to serve no purpose apart from to carry his sponge.

The Magic Roundabout of a new generation

Getting children to bed

Secure and dreamy

Central questions

Dangerous?

No substitute

I clearly have no imagination.

Eleanor Margesson

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