ANNE WOOD, founder of Ragdoll Productions and creator of the Teletubbies insists she really has no idea what her company is worth.

“Whenever I get a man at the other side of the lunch table saying I could make you a very wealthy woman I just go away. It’s not what it’s about for me. I am very interested in the medium of television for children. If I sell Ragdoll that’s all gone,” says Wood, enjoying a gin and tonic after winning yet another award. This time it is the Olswang Business Award at the FIVE/Women In Film and Television Awards.

The former teacher from Co Durham, who enjoys making children laugh, admits she has had to learn her business skills the hard way.

The company’s first big success was Rosie and Jim, the adventures of two rag dolls on a canal boat along the waterways of Central England. The weather was poor for filming and the first series ran over budget. Eventually more than one million videos were sold but it was Central, the ITV company that broadcast the show, that was the main beneficiary, she notes.

“It was an enormous success and it took me four years to recover,” says Wood. She attended a series of business courses and began to learn about video rights and merchandising and building a global brand.

By the time she won an £8 million BBC tender for a series for pre-school children, Wood not only made sure that she owned the merchandising rights for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po, she also retained all the US rights to the Teletubbies and sold the show there herself. The Teletubbies captivated the pre-kinder tots of the world, particularly in Germany but less so in Japan.

The success of the show ensures that she now appears routinely in lists of the rich. According to those trying to compute figures of her wealth by looking into her rather private world, the Ragdoll founder is worth £150 million, £130 million or a mere £50 million.

Before Teletubbies, Wood had been a television producer at Tyne Tees and then head of children’s programming at TV-am where she, and not Greg Dyke, the current Director-General of the BBC, introduced Roland Rat, the glove puppet who saved the day at the struggling station.

The Ragdoll programmes and characters have included everything from Pob, a secret friend for younger children, to Brum, a Birmingham-based radio-controlled car, to Tots TV and Open A Door, an international exchange of children’s programmes. But Teletubbies was the phenomenon and has been dubbed into 44 languages in 113 countries.

The success of the series has left Anne Wood with fresh burdens: what to do next as a programmer and what to do with Ragdoll, the small company based at Stratford-on-Avon which will next year celebrate its 20th anniversary? She decided quite deliberately to end the Teletubbies series in 1999 after 365 episodes, even though the BBC wanted more. “They would have had me making them to this day,” says Wood. She did make an extra 52 shorter programmes before Teletubby Land was closed down for ever.

Tinky Winky and friends continue to fascinate the under-three year olds but that revenue stream is drying up. Last year, Ragdoll’s turnover fell from £15.4 million to £7.1 million and profits plummeted from £4 million to £130,000.

In part the hiatus was the result of a decision to use the cushion of the revenue from Teletubbies to develop a children’s response unit to hear their views. “What we found,” she says, “was an absolute fascination with new technology.”

The first new series is Boohbah aimed at three-to-six year olds now showing on ITV; it will launch on PBS in America next month. The programme features five little atoms whizzing around.

“I got such a kick the other day from a tape from Japan. A boy of five and a girl of three are just laughing, laughing at Boohbah and actually saying Boohbah to the screen. They got it straight away, that it was their word and they could say it and funny things would happen,” says Wood.

The next big series is Tronji and involves computer games and the internet. “The BBC is very interested in it,” says Wood, determined to add new titles to her list between now and 2007. “In 2007, I will be 70 and the Teletubbies will be ten. Maybe we will have a joint celebration,” she says.

In the meantime she has established creative and business boards to ensure the future of Ragdoll Productions. “Should I need to sell the company, which I may have to do, people would buy (it) rather than just Teletubbies,” she explains. “But I don’t know what the company is worth. I don’t think anyone does,” she adds.

Whatever the future of Ragdoll, Anne Wood is more and more convinced of one thing. “Television is the most underestimated medium in terms of delighting children. People still use it for teaching, when in fact they should be thinking about how children learn,” says Wood, who obviously remains a teacher at heart.

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