Cute overload ... and ambitious yoga

If you have a toddler, you have no choice. You're going to be watching more Waybuloo than anything else. Forget The Wire.

This is the Teletubbies Reloaded, basically. Instead of Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky-Winky, we get the Piplings. The same, only ruthlessly re-engineered to hit the winsomeness button even harder.

Yojojo is brown, vaguely monkeylike; Nok Tok is blue, supposedly bearish. Both are boys; Lau Lau is purple, rabbity; De Li is pink, a fey kitty. Both are girls. Got that? You will have, after the first few months, believe me.

They have huge heads with vast ET-style eyes. Save for clownishly large feet, bodies are vestigial appendages. They bound round a paradise garden home, "Nara", and when happy, feel "Buloo" and float up, eyes closed in ecstasy.

They speak in sickly-sweet childish voices. They love strawberries. Into Nara come some real tots, branded, I regret to say, Cheebies. There are three white, one black, one Indian, one Chinese, in the first episode.

They're a desperate lot of dogooders, one and all, both Piplings and Cheebies.

Two main activities featured every time (100 episodes commissioned already) are "Peepa!", aka hide-and-seek, and "yogo", which is, believe it or not, yoga. Piplings and the Cheebies adopt surprisingly ambitious yoga postures in a garden hippyishly bedecked with windchimes and crystals.

It's a shameless attempt to get our pre-schoolers off their arses.

The stories are more didactic than any Victorian children's literature. In episode one, Yojojo and Nok Tok blow a trumpet so loudly they scare the others, who plead with them to play more quietly.

A familiar inner-city scenario. So they pick out a pretty tune, ever so gently, instead of resorting to knife crime.

Waybuloo starts on CBeebies at 9.10am tomorrow.