It is easy to be distracted by the other-worldly appearance of the Teletubbies into believing that Teletubbieland is not located on our planet. Don't be so hasty. The grass, and more particularly the rabbits, are definitely of terrestrial origin. This is Earth alright.

The baby's face in the sun poses a few questions, but the application of Analytical Thought and The Scientific Method will, as always, come through with the answer. Look at the clues. The sun which shines down on Teletubbieland emits white light. Daylight. The light for whose radiation our eyes have evolved. The baby face entity thing is too yellow and nowhere near bright enough to be lighting this scenery. The conclusion? That the baby is not, in fact, the sun at all. How obvious!

I would like to call your attention to the following image from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This shows the star child in profile, rather than the usual portrait view seen from Teletubbieland. If you remember the Odyssey, Dave Bowman returns from his encounter with the monolith transformed into the juvenile stage of a higher consciousness, and ushers in a new era of peace on the divided, violent planet below. Of course 2001 was written in a time when the space programme was racing ahead in an orgy of optimism and the spending of great wodges of cash. In reality, we have yet to leave the cradle of Earth. Our meeting with those mysterious aliens has been delayed. The star child will arrive too late to prevent the catastrophic war that is approaching, and will have to settle for giggling at Tinky Winky's poor coordination instead.

So what have we got so far? That Teletubbieland is on Earth, and that it isn't so many million years in the future that the sun has started to cool down, or do whatever it is stars do in the future. Can we narrow it down any further?

The Teletubbie house is located in a landscape showing clear evidence of (geologically) recent glaciation. The verdant landscape is supported by fertile till scoured out of some distant mountain range, and drumlins [fig i] abound.

The important question is, did this glacial action occur before or after the Teletubbie house was built? An analysis of the house reveals it to have been damaged by some form of advanced weapon system. Since the surrounding landscape shows no further signs of battle, ancient or recent, the conclusion we must draw is that the glaciers came after the construction and subsequent partial destruction of the house, cleansing the landscape. The house, made of bomb-hardened materials and effectively streamlined, was equal to the task of surviving a glacier on top of it.

So, we can suppose that a cataclysmic war occurred in our near future (don't worry, it won't be for a few years yet. Just look at the technology available at the outbreak of the war). The resultant nuclear winter plunged the Earth into another ice-age. The Teletubbies, when we see them, are living in a postglacial environment, so the earliest this can be is in the first interglacial period of that ice-age - about 50,000 years in the future. The next time slot would be 100,000 years after that - 150,000 years in the future. This starts to stretch the limits of credulity for the Noo Noo's ability to continue operating. We wouldn't expect to find any of the house's systems operable in this sort of time frame. So we can confidently date Teletubbieland at around 50,000 years from now.