The co-creator and writer of the children's TV smash hit remember how they started off with the moon landings and ended up with photographers in helicopters

Anne Wood, co-creator

The BBC wanted a new show for pre-schoolers and asked our company, Ragdoll, to pitch. We were interested in how children were reacting to the increasingly technological environment of the late 1990s. We'd just visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and Andrew [Davenport] had been amused at how astronauts looked like toddlers in nappies. We drew up a picturebook of technological babies, took it to the BBC – and were unnerved to find that the 11 other companies bidding had brought lots of fancy equipment and technical displays.

I wasn't sure I wanted the commission. The 100 episodes required would have launched our comfortably small-scale company into new territory. When we won, the first challenge was to find a place to shoot it. We always shot our programmes outside, but we couldn't find anywhere with a suitable bowl-like dip. In the end, a Warwickshire farmer, on whose land we'd filmed our 1990s show Tots TV, rented us a field and we excavated the hole ourselves.

I hadn't realised that another TV show had been filmed in the area and had caused havoc, so the locals started protesting about us. I had to make my case to the planning authorities, wondering how, if they refused me, I'd explain to the BBC that I'd spend £150,000 digging a hole and might have to spend another £150,000 filling it in. I assured them it was a low-key children's programme and no one would be aware of the filming. But as soon as it was broadcast, we had photographers crawling across fields and hovering from helicopters. We had to hire a security firm to police the site. We were so keen to keep the location a secret, we would blindfold visitors.

We had to audition hundreds of people to find actors who understood that they were not trying to be children, but trying to appeal to them. The successful applicants had to develop their character's unique style of speech by recalling how they spoke as children. The woman who played Po was Chinese and struggled to find her Teletubby voice as English wasn't her mother tongue. So we decided Po should use Mandarin.

Another problem was the rabbits. They needed to be big to fit in with the scale, and the only suitable ones we could find had been bred on the continent to be eaten. We gave them perfect conditions, running free over the Teletubby grasslands, but their breeding had given them enlarged hearts, and almost weekly the animal trainer would greet me in distress and tell me another had died. We lost seven out of 11. At least they died happy.

None of us could understand the success of the show or the furore it provoked – critics claimed it was not educational enough. There was an innocence, as well as a glorious silliness, to the series, which is why I never permitted it to become a pantomime because of the inevitable salacious jokes that would pollute it. We were trying to reflect children's experience back to them. It was a world in which technology was developing at an extraordinary rate: children were growing up in an environment where objects spoke from the walls or moved about.

As I'd expected, the series threw our company into a bigger arena. From then on, there was the stress of trying to follow up the success, but art is not a factory. We just happened to capture the zeitgeist of a changing world.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video

Andrew Davenport, writer

I was fascinated by the moon landings. It struck me as funny that, at this pinnacle of human achievement, the figures that emerged in bulky spacesuits from landing capsules are like toddlers, with oversized heads and foreshortened legs – and they respond to the excitement of their new world by bouncing about. So I devised characters based on spacemen, with limited language just like the emergent speech of young children. I was inspired by Benny Hill, who sometimes used speeded-up film of people for his gags, and the physical humour of Morecambe and Wise.

Part of the BBC's brief was to include live-action pictures of children. This presented problems. Tinky Winky was 8ft 6in tall so the Teletubbies would have seemed like monsters to kids. So I put TVs on to their tummies: I was entertained by the idea that the Teletubbies watch children on their screens with the same fascination that children watch Teletubbies on theirs.

I wrote the scripts in a caravan on the set in which I lived for weeks on end because I had to adapt to the capabilities of the performers – at the start, they said they couldn't walk on grass because their costumes were too unwieldy. The worst times were when it had been raining for days, and I'd have to set the action indoors because it was too wet to film outside. There was no studio – all the indoor shots were done inside the 60ft dome in the field. It was taxing thinking up enough indoor action. Once there was a huge rainstorm, and the set began to vanish under water. We all sheltered in the dome, but water began bubbling through, and the fire brigade had to pump us out. Several of us had to spend that night in Teletubbyland because the fields were too flooded to cross.

The media interest astonished us all that first summer in 1997. We'd be trying to get on with making a quiet, innocent programme – with helicopters overhead and Land Rovers hurtling towards us. Almost every day, there'd be something about us in the papers, until the death of Princess Diana diverted attention. Photographers' main goal seemed to be to get pictures of the Teletubbies without their heads on, so we had to build a tent in the corner of the field where they could remove them in secret. It felt like the press was trying to tell kids that Santa Claus didn't exist.

• This article was amended on 4 June 2013. The original referred to the Smithsonian Institute. That should have been the Smithsonian Institution, and has been corrected.