Technofile: The Shape Of Things To Come

Few Teletubbies sites survived the BBC's summer offensive, intended to clear the Web of Tubbyimages reproduced without permission.

Happily for the diehards, computer graphic techniques offer a way of keeping sites illustrated, and more creative into the bargain. The enterprising Dr Moose presents stills from dramatic secret footage, suppressed by the television com- panies, which reveals the existence of a conspiracy to cover up the Tubbytruth. They include shots of an autopsy being conducted on a Teletubby (above), and a glimpse of one in the wild.

Dr Moose's analysis of Tubby morphology and artefacts leads him to conclude that the Teletubbies are creatures of a post-apocalyptic future. They evolved from Teletroopers, who found themselves on the losing side in the great conflict despite having been genetically engineered as warriors. The troopers' vital attribute was their chameleonic skin. This camouflage device required a lot of neural processing capacity, leaving no space in the brain for specialisations such as common sense. The effects were exacerbated after the end of civilisation, when gestation began to take place in female Teletroopers rather than in vats, as hitherto. Savage natural selection drove down head size, depriving the new Teletubbies of the ability to change their skin colour, but not compensating them with the ability to find their bottoms using both hands.

Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po are fortunate enough to have their environment maintained by the Noo-Noo, a vestige of the technology which originally sustained them. Feral Teletubbies are sorry specimens, though, easily captured and used in experiments. The researchers, Dr Moose has concluded, are none other than the Morlocks, the underworld creatures of H G Wells's The Time Machine. Wells got it wrong: the Morlocks are the ruling class; the Eloi - the Teloitubbies - are the oppressed. It's a bold theory, but Moose does have that picture of the Morlocks conducting the autopsy, which is every bit as convincing as the Roswell footage that surfaced a year or two ago. And his evolutionary scenario is more theoretically sophisticated than some scholarly models of human evolution I could mention.