To a grown-up viewer who may still be reeling from first contact with In The Night Garden, Waybuloo looks comfortingly normal at first glance.  A gentle theme tune plays as the camera pans over the magic land of Nara while the Piplings – four smiling elfin thingies – fly happily around.   After that, most episodes open with one of the Piplings bouncing happily onto the screen and talking – with words, actual words! – to set up the hook for this episode.  Somebody has found an interesting cave, or wants to draw a bird, or something.

And then, almost immediately, the story is put on hold because a machine made of crystals and pan pipes summons everyone to participate in a yoga demonstration.

Waybuloo is, superficially, a bit new age.  Like In The Night Garden, it’s set in a beautiful rural world, though a less obviously stylised one.  Unlike In The Night Garden, it would like the little ones to get off the sofa and join them in some gentle “yogo”, which involves doing some poses that are demonstrated by the Piplings.  Every episode follows the same course.  Near the start, there’s a yogo segment.  About halfway through, a group of live-action children show up (“cheebies”, the Piplings call them) and a game of hide and seek ensues.  Near the end, there’s more yogo, this time with the children joining in.

In between those regular segments, though, there is indeed an actual story, in which some sort of problem is introduced and resolved (always with the involvement of the kids, and usually with them making the crucial suggestion).  Unlike Night Garden‘s scorched-earth, tabula-rasa approach, Waybuloo deals in things that are indisputably stories, and characters with some recognisable emotional range.  There’s no conflict, of course, but the Piplings are capable of basic stories like “Yojojo breaks the toy Noktok made specially for him, and thinks Noktok will be upset if he finds out, so he spends the rest of the episode trying to pretend it’s still working”.  That sort of thing.

Obviously we’re still talking about pretty basic characters here.  The Piplings may not be defined by their signature props, but they are linked to fairly broad themes which, for the purpose of the kids, are mainly represented through their hobbies.  So Lau Lau is meant to be imagination (she paints), De Li is love (she gardens), Noktok is intelligence (he makes stuff), and Yojojo is happiness (he… er, plays music).  The gender aspects are vaguely stereotypical; the girls do art and nurturing, the boys get mischief and tinkering in a shed.  And poor Noktok, being the practical one, seems to be written with the least emotional intelligence.

All that said, it’s a show with charm and moments of gentle humour that make it rather more watchable to adult audiences.  It’s also a genuinely impressive production; when you stop to think about what must have been involved in making it, the scale of it starts to sink in.

If you didn’t click the link at the start of the post, go and watch the credits sequence now.  If the CBeebies site is region-blocked for you, it’s not too hard to find versions on YouTube.

Bear this in mind as you watch it: once you get past the close-up on Lau Lau’s face that fills the screen, what you’re looking at is a physical set, save for the mountains in the distance, which are green-screened.  It’s huge.  The trees are real; the leaves are sewn on.  The Piplings’ individual houses are physical sets as well; there are elaborately designed interiors, occasionally seen on screen and built around each character’s hobbies.  Apparently it was a specially constructed studio in a converted hangar near Glasgow; Scotland didn’t have any existing facilities large enough to accommodate it.  (And for anyone asking “so why film it in Scotland”, let’s just park that for now.  We’ll be talking about Irish tax credits and the like in a future post.)

Not only that, the show involves CGI characters on a physical set (which means synching the cameras), and on top of that, they’ve decided to have those characters interact with real children (which must have been a directorial nightmare, and occasionally involves the Piplings having to touch physical props).  And the vast majority of the animation is very good; it’s clearly had some care put in by animators who were properly resourced.

To get those sorts of production values, you need to spread the cost, and sell abroad.  That’s why the BBC commissioned 100 episodes of this, and they never introduce any other characters beyond the four Piplings, nor do they stray beyond the regular set.  When every episode is a bottle episode, and you’re making a hundred of them, you can afford a really nice bottle.

There’s also one very obvious piece of cost-cutting: unless I’m losing my mind, there seem to be significantly fewer hide-and-seek segments than there are episodes.  They start to get familiar very quickly.  Another curious decision is that the live-action children are dubbed by slightly older children.  It takes a few episodes to notice this, but once you do, you can’t un-see it.  The thinking seems to have been that the live kids were too young to deliver lines convincingly, and perhaps that it might be better to have a wider range of accents on the kids.

Still, these are pretty minor points.  Waybuloo is clearly the work of people who believe that if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Which is interesting, since somehow that attention to detail didn’t prevent Waybuloo being subjected to a wildly misconceived re-edit in 2012.  According to the announcement at the time, the BBC’s thinking was that they could “make the show easier for families to watch together” – in other words, make it more tolerable to older children.  And to do that, they had two big ideas.  First, they cut down the episodes from twenty minutes to ten, largely by axing the lengthy first yogo segment from each episode.  The BBC seems to go back and forth about which edits to use, but at the moment they’re using the ten-minute versions.

Second, they decided to add a narrator.  This seems like an obviously bad idea to start with, even if you are trying to gloss over some missing connective tissue from the cut sequences.  The show wasn’t designed to have a narrator, let alone one chipping into the gaps that happened to be left between dialogue – and certainly not one who talks throughout the entire yogo segment.  So the thinking is bizarre enough to start with, before you even get to the step where they cast Dave Lamb, the voice of Channel 4’s Come Dine With Me.

Obviously, Lamb didn’t narrate Waybuloo with the same unremitting sarcasm that he brings to CDWM.  But he’s still Dave Lamb, and in a show designed around pan pipes, crystals and yoga, he is incredibly out of place.  One of his episodes can be found on YouTube, and it’s an astonishing exercise in tone-wrecking.  One can only imagine that somebody in the BBC must have been having second thoughts about this before it even aired, since the format change lasted the whole of one day.   That’s why there’s only one of his episodes on YouTube.  It’s the only one that aired.

The toddler demographic wields a brutal judgment that no adult fandom can match.  You can’t exactly complain that they aren’t keeping an open mind about change.  If they’re outraged and scared of the voice, nobody can tell them they’re wrong.  But if anything it’s more surprising that such an odd idea made it as far as production, than that it got pulled so quickly.

Waybuloo is best experienced in the original episodes, where its languid pace, quality animation and relaxed stories can play out in the way its creators intended.  But the 10-minute edits without narration aren’t bad; they give you the general idea.  It doesn’t have the sheer oddity of Night Garden; once you tune in to the format, the seemingly random yogo intervals become second nature and it all starts to seem fairly normal.  It’s really quite conventional under the hood, but done with enough heart to avoid pure cutesiness.  The vision here is about production quality and getting everything right; it delivers there.

Next time, how to serve two audiences at once: Bing.