'The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened to the Under-grounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of the Morlocks--that, by the by, was the name by which these creatures were called--I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even far more profound than among the "[T]Eloi[tubbies]," the beautiful race that I already knew.'

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

H. G. Wells, writing one hundred years ago, predicted a future uncannily similar to Teletubbieland in several important respects. He was wrong in many of the details. Of course he was wrong, he lived in olden days, and hadn't even heard of computers. His idea of a time machine involved ivory and oiled brass, whereas we know now that you require a DeLorean and a flux capacitor before you can get anywhere. But for all that, his vision of the Thames valley in the year 802,701 comes startlingly close to the Teletubbieland of 51,997, even if, as with the 'the camera that fired the Heat-Ray' described in War of the Worlds which is clearly in reality a laser, he is able to forsee the end results of technological advance without actually following any of the intervening steps.

In Wells' vision, it is the Teletubbies (or Eloi, as he calls them) who are the ruling class (or what's left of them), with the Morlocks (what's left of the working class) living underground and tending the machinery. Wells, for all his foresight when it came to industrialisation and technological advance, failed to predict that, just as his time was seeing the replacement of manual toil by machinery, the future would see a similar technological displacement of human brains. His races were separated by the leisured classes' need for workers to maintain the machinery of their decadence. In reality, the machinery looks after itself (as the Noo Noo demonstrates), and the races of Teletubbies and Morlocks have the opposite power-relationship, and are separated instead by an accident of powers beyond the capacity of Wells' Victorian brains to comprehend. But let's not call him an idiot. He did jolly well.

Note that in this (admittedly fanciful) poster from the 1960 film of The Time Machine, the Teletubbie house can be clearly seen, along with the "artist"'s impression of the underground structures. The generic Hollywood actress shown running away in Surprise and Panic is the film's version of Weena the Eloi, who in turn is H. G. Wells' version of Laa Laa the Teletubbie. Talk about Chinese Whispers. The poster also confuses the situation on the Earth's surface at the time of the Eloi/Teletubbies with Wells' later descriptions of the planet's death, millions of years hence. The fertile paradise seen in Teletubbies, and correctly predicted by Wells, has been replaced with an arid desert.

We never see the Morlocks in the flesh in Teletubbies, but we can imagine what they must look like. According to Wells, 'They were just the half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum.', and 'their eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the abysmal fishes'. Well, it's possible. But remember, they haven't spent these fifty thousand years in oily, smelly darkness. They've had the benefit of electric light, and no doubt a modern gymnasium too. There will be more of Sean Connery in 'Zardoz' to our Morlocks.