Hold On, Does This Mean the Teletubbies Fuck?

Question: are Teletubbies monsters? I'm going to do this, I'm going to look up the definition of "monster":

Yes.

Also yes. Motherfuckers are ten foot tall. So we have established Teletubbies are harrowing hell creatures sent to kill us from the nether-realm: we all agree on this. But can they fuck, though? Do they fuck? In a scientific paper I like to call "Yo: Can Teletubbies Fuck?", I intend to find out.

The thing is, I had never before thought about Teletubbies fucking (*1) until this week. This week, a "viral tweet" happened, which highlighted information from a 2015 episode of Teletubbies, in which it turns out baby Teletubbies exist. The small beasts are known canonically as "Tiddlytubbies".

Observe: observe the monsters, wriggling and contorting beneath the light of the sun:

So Teletubbies exist and Tiddlytubbies exist. Immediately, that means someone fucked Po.

The Teletubbies live in a world where vacuum cleaners have achieved a level of autonomy and sentience, and where the creatures inhabiting the planet have tele screens in their stomachs. The sun has a face. We have to assume that the Teletubbies live at least 1,000 years into our future, lush green over the ruined rubble of our world, and that their technology is more advanced than ours. Some mad fucker in the Teletubbies world gave a hoover a brain, man. If you think they can't make a Tiddlytubby fuck-free – test tube Tiddlytubbies – then you're wrong. They can.

The Teletubbies clearly all have fuck apparatus on their heads and I'm sorry but they fuck with them. They fuck.

Look at their heads, here. It's sort of unfair to thrust the human concept of "gender" onto the Teletubbies here, especially as it doesn't seem pertinent to whether they can fuck, but we do need some sort of labelling terminology, so I'm going to go ahead and say Dipsy and Laa-Laa are "givers" and Po and Tinky Winky are "receivers", i.e. Dipsy and Laa-Laa fuck and Tinky Winky and Po get fucked. I suppose Laa-Laa and Dipsy could very feasibly just headbutt their quasi-dicks together enough until everyone gets off, and Tinky Winky and Po could interlock their loops and sort of scissor them together towards something, actually, so it's safe to say the Teletubbies can easily couple up and fuck in essentially any combination you like. Or: they could all fuck at once, like a monstrous and horny pile of pillows.

Now let us behold the tiny monsters known as Tiddlytubbies:

Simple ones first: Daa Daa (green Tiddlytubby) is clearly the result of Dipsy asexually reproducing, and same goes for Umby Pumby (yellow, produced by Laa-Laa ). Duggle Dee (red) is Po's fuckless child, Nin (purple) is a Tinky Winky clone. Then it gets trickier.

Remember your first day of uni? The air seemed spring-like even though it was on the cusp of autumn: crisp, fresh, electric with possibility. You inhaled great lungfuls of it while you shuttled your IKEA-fresh possessions down from the car up three flights to your room: a new duvet, with covers; coathangers; a mess of kitchen equipment; three sieves. Your TV, your treasured DVD collection, a single pot plant, some books. Unfurl a poster in the room that for eight months would become your first home. A grey sheen off the corridor tiles, a tentative wave to your new flatmates. Soon your mum would drive off again and it would just be you, in this room of yours, alone. For the first time: alone.

So— sorry, bit of radio static there? Or something? So the Tiddlytubbies who aren't immediate colour-matches to their fuck-frenzy elders are trickier to cast. You've got MiMi (light blue), a sort of mix of Tinky Winky's purple and a dash of Laa-Laa's vivid yellow—

You had dreams, then, didn't you? You had hopes. You only ever chose this degree because you were good at A-Level English; you sort of stumbled into it, knew you had to leave home and learn. But then, over the course of one summer, you realised: you wanted to write, didn't you? That was your talent, that alone was your skill. Pursue it with holy devotion: study for three years, here, read read read, work work work, write write write, and then, later, you would be ready to conquer all, soon all your dreams would come true. A columnist, an essayist, novels. Works of great meta-fiction. The first true British classic in a generation. They would say your names in hushed tones. They would teach it in future lessons. The students around you now will one day boast they studied alongside you then. You would become a legend.

Then, uh, yeah, so after that you've got RuRu (orange), which is a pretty straight mix of Laa-Laa's yellow and Po's red, so uh… yeah so that—

Every night the shared kitchen in this flat would go through three moods – the hi-energy thrill of pre-drinking and playing Ring of Fire, empty beer cans rolling onto the floor, ashtrays overflowing, every boy trying to reinvent himself as interesting and sexually viable by wearing A Fun Hat; then the semi-silence of the room after everyone has vacated it to go to a club night, where it's only that one weird German student furiously and silently making pasta; and then the kitchen breathes again, everyone stumbling in, cold skin from the night outside, one by one by one, bringing with them the energy of the night, preparing and eating toast, and dropping toast, and smoking an extremely awful shared weed joint, and talking, about hopes and dreams and fears and the future, in soft voices that soon grow loud—

Christ and then Ping, uh, which— Ping is pink, so, sort of Po, but sort of lightened out with a dash of Laa-Laa, I guess, so yeah another sort of—

And you always said, didn't you: I am studying English so I can be a writer. I am going to be a writer. A respectable writer. And they would marvel, at that. Amongst the group were future musicians and accountants and student nurses. A guy who would go into sales. A psychologist. All of us latent, unmoulded, shapeless. We all had a vague idea of what we would turn into but not when or how. "I will study, hard, for three years," you would say, "then become a writ—

Yeah uh um so Baa is blue, uh not light blue kind of more a… I mean it sort of more approached a navy, sort of blue, I guess and uh—

And then it didn't really happen, like that, did it? When you first moved to London, all these hopes and dreams, all these notebooks in your rucksack like the caricature of a tosser you are, it didn't happen: nobody was willing to turn your urgent need of wanting to be a writer into actually becoming a writer. So you worked a temp job, starting at six weeks ('I'll write on the side!') and ending up taking two-and-a-half years; and then you worked another job, after that, an even worse one; and then, four years into your dream move to your dream city, you realised you hadn't written a word in months; and then what, then how do you crawl back up again? All that hope. All that study. All that hard work. You have to make it—

Yeah so Baa, I suppose, is Tinky Winky getting fucked off Laa-Laa, a bit. I suppose that's how. That's how that happened.

It is today, July 28 2017. You are 30 years old. A tear opens up across the void. In it, Yung Joel reaches across the infinite. Look at his long hair. His nu-rave Topman T-shirts. His non-ironic collection of twine bracelets. He is wearing the worst trainers you have ever seen in your life. He looks young and untarnished and full of hope. "Old Joel!" he says, excitement fit to burst. "Oh my god. Oh my god! The future. Did we— did we become a writer? All that study!"

Yeah Baa is… Tinky Winky fucked Laa-Laa and made Baa.

You pause, a little. You pause. "Yes," you say. "We are a writer." He looks thrilled. "It's all I ever wanted!" he says. He must be 21, 22. "I sort of thought— I… you know, that stage we were at where we had nearly given up?" he says.

Your voice croaks a little. It comes out like a whisper. "Yeah."

"I'm there," he says. "But I'm— I'm just so glad we made it. That it was worth it."

And yeah, RuRu…. Laa-Laa fucked Po and made RuRu. It actually all makes quite a lot of sense.

"What do we write?" he says. He's holding that notebook you both spent a year-and-a-half writing notes in for that aborted sitcom script. Tiny handwriting, pages floppy with ink. You had a whole key so the major characters could just be identified by a single initial: J, S, K. All that work, for nothing. "Did this—?" "No," you say. "No, not a…. not a sitcom."

The Teletubbies and the Tiddlytubbies all have a big wide car to get around in, seeing as there are now 11 of them plus Noo-Noo. It's called the Tubby Car. Thanks.

"What about novels?" he's asking again. "The draft on our computer, did it—?" It didn't. "Do we write columns, for national newspapers? You always wanted a fun column in Saturday Times, didn't you? Taking a sideways look at things." And: "Yeah," you say. "I did. Not that." His face is questioning, now. "So what do—?" he asks. "What do we write?"

Look at the copy on this page right now. Look back at the void of what you used to be, as it looks back at what became of you.

The Teletubbies' house is called "Home Hill" because it is a hill.

"What do we do?" he's asking. "What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?" He's getting manic now. "What do we do?"

The Teletubbies have a house and a car and kids. The Teletubbies fuck. The Teletubbies have their lives more together than you do, than you ever will.

"What if the Teletubbies fucked?" you ask him. Stony silence. Repeat it again in case communications across the void are interrupted: "What if the Telet—" He stops you with a raised hand. "I heard you." There's a pause, between you. This is how socially awkward you are: you have manufactured a way to produce an awkward silence between yourself and yourself . "No, I heard what you said." He looks disappointed. He turns around in his chair to his desktop computer and clicks delete on the file marked "FIRST NOVEL". "Yeah, no, I—" he turns back. He tries to smile. "It's good that we… yeah. No it's good. At least we made the family proud."

"Oh," you say. "No."

"Okay, well. You know." He looks up, rubs his eyes. "Yeah, mate," he says. "No, it's good. Sounds good up there. 'What if the Teletubbies fucked.' Heh. Yeah— what if?"

What if

What if

What if

What if the Teletubbies—

What if

The Teletubbies

Fucked

@joelgolby

(*1) It is difficult to think of any children's TV mainstays fucking, to be quite honest, but this is a smoky cave into which we must enter. Dave Benson Phillips, fucking. Think about it. "YAHOO!" he says, while he's doing it. "YAROO!" Very bombastic lover, Dave Benson Phillips, I imagine. Keeps his jazzy shirt on throughout. Bouncing around like a trampoline. He calls the moment of climax "a gunging". Or: the Chuckle Brothers, fucking. Every time The Chuckle Brothers fuck they have to negotiate it around a series of collapsing ladders. Do you think they ever fucked in the back of the ChuckMobile? God, actually, this isn't one article, is it, it's an entire series of them, each more harrowing than the last—†

†It's actually much easier than you think to shatter every remnant of childlike innocence we have, almost all of it attached to children's TV, the remnants, every last scrap of our unsullied selves being lashed to the cross of it, and it has happened to me twice now, this shattering, two different incidents: first one was when I stayed up late half-pissed and managed to catch a late-night repeat of the bewildering BBC Three documentary "Kirsten's Topless Ambition", in which former SMart presenter Kirsten O'Brien flirts with the idea of doing a topless shoot but ultimately just doesn't, but it features very odd scenes like this, of her cheerfully doing a fully-clothed pole dance for Peter Stringfellow; and the second was when I was in a pub for my 24th birthday and the bartender seemed familiar, somehow; I kept looking at him but couldn't place him, and then I realised: ah, oh shit, it's Jez, from CBBC – you know Jez! And I went up to him and said "you are Jez from CBBC", and he very intensely said "YES MATE JEZ MATE NICE TO MEET YOU MATE" and very firmly shook my hand, and I don't know, the whole incident very much made me feel hollow and full of despair.

I suppose we cannot expect our children's entertainers to stay wholesome and unsullied forever, can we. At one time or another they put Ed the Duck down for the final time and step into the real world. But those moments where the primary-coloured world of CBBC intersects with the actual real world, of concretes and bills and greys— they are very vivid, very real. Very troubling. They really dig into a small, fragile, heart-shaped section of yourself that you never really knew was there, and shatter it apart forever. Your innocence will never be retrieved. Anyway, back to Teletubbies fuckin—