Familiar aliens: Teletubbies and postmodern childhood

Screen

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 373-387

  Bignell, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51249133811     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjh078     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. This essay draws on a broader theoretical argument about postmodernism and children's media, in Jonathan Bignell, Postmodern Media Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 114-33
2. David Buckingham, 'Child-centred television?: Teletubbies and the educational imperative', in David Buckingham (ed.), Small Screens: Television for Children (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2002), pp. 38-61
3. Jean-François Lyotard, 'Answering the question: what is postmodernism?', in Thomas Docherty (ed), Postmodernism: a Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 44
4. The South Warwickshire director of tourism, Alex Holmes, reported: This summer, our visitor information patrols have been asked more about where to find the Teletubbies than about the birthplace of William Shakespeare'. Quoted in M. Bergman, 'The new fab four', Radio Times, 27 September-3 October 1997, p. 20
5. See Rick Altman, 'Television sound', in Horace Newcombe (ed.), Television: the Critical View (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 566-85
6. Karen Lury discusses television sound using Teletubbies as a case study in her Interpreting Television (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), pp. 57-94
7. On the history of children's television's pseudo-parental functions, see David Oswell, Watching with mother in the early 1950s', in Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham (eds), In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 1995), pp. 34-46
8. A sequence showing empirical research through play at Ragdoll's headquarters appears in the documentary Big Hug: the Making of Teletubbies (BBC, 1998)
9. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Cambridge: Polity, 1991)
10. Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 194
11. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (London: WH Allen, 1933)
12. I have analyzed this duality in relation to toys in Jonathan Bignell, 'Where is Action Man's penis?: determinations of gender and the bodies of toys', in Naomi Segal, Lib Taylor and Roger Cook (eds), Indeterminate Bodies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 36-47
13. '"Get ready for action!": reading Action Man toys', in Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins (eds), 'A Necessary Fantasy?': the Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture (New York, NY and London: Garland, 2000), pp. 231-50
14. th Century Britain (Trowbridge: Flicks, 1996), pp. 165-84
15. This argument about materiality and identity is used in deconstructive work on the body in relation to sexual identity, in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1993)
16. Roger Singleton-Turner, Television and Children (London: BBC, 1994]
17. 'About Teletubbies', accessed from www.ragdoll.co.uk
18. On initial responses to Teletubbies from parents, educators and the press, see David Buckingham, Telly trouble', English and Media Magazine, no. 39 (Autumn 1998), pp. 14-18
19. Celia Dodd, 'Teletubbies mastermind', Radio Times 27 September - 3 October 1997, p. 22
20. See Jonathan Bignell, 'Writing the child in media theory'. Yearbook of English Studies no. 32 (2002), pp. 127-39
21. Jason Jacobs, 'Teletubbies', in Glen Creeber (ed.), Fifty Key Television Programmes (London: Arnold, 2004), pp. 203-7
22. Lury, Interpreting Television, pp. 88-94