The Tinky Winky magnate - FT.com There is only one topic that reveals a vulnerable side to Anne Wood: retirement. Until the conversation veers on to discussing the end of her career, she appears invincible. A 5ft powerhouse of pragmatism she is refreshingly lacking in sentimentality despite being preoccupied for the past five decades with children: as a teacher, a mother, and as a children's publisher before moving into the sector that made her name - children's television. In a satin cerise blouse with matching streaks in her white hair and a little Scottish terrier brooch pinned to her jacket, the founder of Ragdoll Productions - the TV company she started 27 years ago, and maker of hit programmes such as Teletubbies, In the Night Garden and more recently Abney & Teal - looks far younger than her 74 years. Feisty and focused, she barrels about the bright green, orange and yellow rooms of Ragdoll Production's headquarters near Stratford-upon-Avon, in the Midlands. Sitting on one of the squishy sofas in her office - known as "the library," it is bursting with books, DVDs, videos and children's toys - she pauses to reflect on retirement. "It sounds awful to say it's akin to bereavement, but it's so much a part of you, it is very difficult to put aside," she admits. She recounts the slog of being patronised as a "woman [doing] little children's programmes. People used to say things like "Oh my wife would like to do what you do."" That stopped when she launched Teletubbies, featuring Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. It became a worldwide hit, screened in more than 100 countries, translated into 45 languages, and spawning a number one single, Teletubbies say "Eh-Oh." The programme's success put her on the Sunday Times rich list. The perception shifted. Because [people] measure success by how much money you make," she says. These days she is likely to be railing against the lack of funding for children's TV from broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, following the fragmentation of the market thanks to multi-channel broadcasting. "The predominant culture [is becoming] North American and animation is forced to go outside of this country," she says. I sound nationalistic, but it is a terrible crisis that we're undergoing. So, that's why I want to keep Ragdoll going and keep as much young talent in work as I can. Her fortitude, she says, derives from her impoverished upbringing in the north-east of England. My parents were very disappointed all the time - they lost babies and they had a sad life. I grew up with a gritty determination: if you don't have money, it robs you of all dignity. Nonetheless there was security: "I didn't have stuff, but I had lots of love." She trained as a teacher - "as girls did in those parts of the world then" - in Leeds, where she met her husband, Barrie. After working in a secondary modern school, she started Books for Your Children, a magazine that led to her creating The Book Tower programme for Yorkshire Television. In 1982, she became head of children's TV for TV-am, the breakfast channel, where she introduced the puppet Rol­and Rat, which was credited with taking the station's flagging audience from 100,000 to 1.8m within months. But after a management overhaul, she was fired. Egged on by colleagues and the proliferation of independent production companies after the launch of Channel 4, she decided to start one herself. "I didn't want to do it because I had run the magazine for a long time and I knew how hard it was to actually do business," she says. But I had two children and I had to work. In 1984, she started Ragdoll put­ting up the family home as security. In those days, you used to get the cost of the programme from the broadcaster plus a production fee. So, it was a feasible thing to do, but you had to be very careful about your borrowing. For 12 years, I dared not exceed £10,000 [on my overdraft]. When the home video market for children took off in the mid-1990s, her series Rosie and Jim, featuring two ragdolls living on a narrow boat, sold 1m videos. It also made a lot of money for the broadcaster, Central Television - but not Ms Wood. "I felt that was unfair," she says. The iron entered my soul . . . I realised I had to do it properly, I had to have an international profile. So she put herself through business courses, noting that most of it "seemed to be common sense." She also recruited a business adviser who, appalled that she was still using her house as collateral, encouraged her to raise money against the catalogue of programmes to which she held the rights. This allowed her to garner £1m of funding for Teletubbies. If it all went wrong, she reasoned, her employees were "young enough to get other jobs and I, even then, was old enough to retire." What she had not anticipated was the programme's phenomenal global success. "It almost blew our company away," she says. To have a success that big [come] to a company so small is a mixed blessing. It distorted the view of Ragdoll. You were inundated by people from all over the world and expectations were raised to an absolutely impossible level. Ms Wood credits the fact that such success came in her late fifties with her ability to keep a level head and her decision to plough the profits back into the company, which has kept it afloat during straitened times. Last year, the company made a loss of just over £970,000 (after interest and tax), after a profit of £571,754 in 2010, on revenues of £2.3m. She has decided to invest in the company - taking on new talent and developing new programmes which, she hopes, will bear fruit in better times. But she does not expect to replicate "a phenomenon" like Teletubbies . "They come once every millennium," she says of the company's future. Now her focus is on Abney & Teal, an animated series laden with nostalgia. We're living in such anxious times, we can create that haven of comfort. If there's anxiety at the parental level, children will pick it up. So, I think there is a need to create something that's reassuring. There is also a possible sale of Ragdoll Worldwide, a joint venture with BBC Worldwide, the corporation's com­mercial arm, which would provide some capital. Meanwhile, she is working with her son, Christopher, a for­mer theatre producer, who has been at the company since 1998 and now runs the production side, on a possible handover. But it is as much about her as her children: she knows it is a way to maintain some kind of role: "I'm being utterly selfish. I want my son to have this company so I can still work.