Tots TV
Trailer
Synopsis
Tilly, Tom and Tiny are three ragdoll friends living in a secret countryside cottage. They divide their days between the warmth of home — stories, games, small discoveries — and trips into the everyday world, where they meet real children and adults. Tilly carries a magic bag that produces exactly the right object for each situation, and whatever they encounter outside, they return home to work it out through play.
Context & Trivia
The three leads are ragdoll puppets performed by the same people who wrote the scripts: Robin Stevens performed Tom, Andrew Davenport performed Tiny, and Véronique Déroulède was the original performer of Tilly, later succeeded by Claire Carre and Alexandra Hogg. It is an uncommon arrangement in children's television — having the puppeteers who manipulated the dolls also author every word they expressed gave the characters a consistency between written personality and physical performance that is rarely achieved when those roles are separated. Davenport also voiced Furryboo, a mischievous dog the Tots themselves never managed to spot.
The series came from Ragdoll Productions, the studio that would draw a direct line of soft-toy puppet television for very young children through to Teletubbies and In the Night Garden. The cottage built for filming, constructed near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, stood until 2021 when it was demolished by its owners. In its earliest run the programme included animated inserts titled 'Mr Noah', produced by Se-ma-for, the Polish stop-motion studio; from the second series those segments were replaced by 'Storybook' shorts — brief animated tales narrated by one of the Tot puppets.
Puppeteers
Robin Stevens, Andrew Davenport, Véronique Déroulède, Claire Carre, Alexandra Hogg
Voices
Véronique Déroulède, Claire Carre, Alexandra Hogg, Robin Stevens, Andrew Davenport, María Moscardó, Mark Heenehan, Kevin Clash
Puppet design
Bob Burke
Direction
Rob Ollerton, Tom Poole, Nick Hayward-Young, Robin Toyne, Vic Finch, Martin Goodsmith, Bob Clyde
Cast
Robin Stevens, Andrew Davenport, Véronique Déroulède
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