ACTRESS Nikky Smedley has lifted the lid on what it was really like playing Laa-Laa on the Teletubbies.
Teletubbies quickly became some of the most recognisable children’s TV characters after they burst onto screens in the 90s – but life wasn’t all fun and games for the actors who played them.
Nikky was cast as the yellow Teletubby Laa-Laa after she responded to a newspaper asking for actors to audition for a new BBC kids show.
The series then launched in 1997, running for four years until 2001, and it forever changed Nikky’s life.
In an interview with The Telegraph to promote her upcoming tell-all Edinburgh Fringe show called Confessions of a Teletubby, Nikky revealed that the TV show lifted her out of poverty.
But, while she is incredibly grateful for the experience and the better life it afforded her, filming Teletubbies definitely wasn’t a walk in the park.
Working on Teletubbies consisted of “long days” and a “nightmare costume” which was “grim,” she revealed.
Nikky likened wearing the suit to being wrapped in more than a dozen blankets, being weighed down by bags of coal and being blindfolded while having to exercise in a sauna for 12 hours.
But there was something about the group of Teletubbies – Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po – that resonated with so many people, and the show’s popularity continued to rise.
It wasn’t until the end of 1997 that Nikky realised this herself.
“At the pub, there was karaoke and a whole bunch of drunk people on the stage doing the Teletubbies single,” she recalled.
However, as their fame grew, she found her Teletubby character had become the object of an unhealthy fixation.
“It started after the Daily Sport printed a badly mocked-up image of Laa-Laa, dressed in black bras and pants, with the tagline, ‘FAKE: Saucy shots of Laa-Laa shock fans,’” Nikky wrote in her memoir Over the Hills and Far Away.
Things got so bad Nikky had to warn BBC bosses that she may have a stalker.
She explained: “I started getting [letters] from a grown man telling me what a saucy little Teletubby I was and what he would like to do to me – with Tubby custard.
“I let the bosses know, in case I came to a grisly – and sticky – end, but after a few months, the letters tailed off and it became apparent that I was no longer starring in the stalker’s fantasies.”
Luckily, the situation never escalated any further.
“We got very well protected. There was the whole Ragdoll office. And the BBC, which filtered things out. Weird messages, yes. Not for me. For Laa-Laa. Grown men, writing love letters to a giant yellow puppet. But there was no harm done in the end.”
Thankfully, Nikky’s anonymity was also protected by the costumes at the non-disclosure agreements she and the cast had to sign, so their identities weren’t promoted by the media.
“We’d signed NDAs, so you couldn’t say (you were in Teletubbies),” she noted.
