Thursday, January 25, 2018

Tinky Winky dead at 52

Simon Shelton Barnes, the British actor who played Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby in the children's television series "Teletubbies," has died, apparently of hypothermia. His body was found on a Liverpool street on January 17th. He was 52.

He is survived by Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po.


9 comments:

  1. Simon Shelton Barnes is a great loss to the acting fraternity. Not many people know this but Dipsy was originally played by George Clooney. Laa-Laa (female)is still played by Meryl Streep and Po (also female) is usually played by Madonna Ciccone.

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    1. Yorkshire Pudding, if I may borrow one of Leonard Nimoy’s lines from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” in response to your references to George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Madonna Ciccone, “Ah. The giants.” Of course, he was a visitor from the 23rd century and was referring to the collected works of Jacqueline Suzanne and the novels of Harold Robbins, but it simply cannot be helped.

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  2. A miracle he was found in Liverpool. Not a place to leave anything lying around.

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  3. Adrian, but someone once found John, George, Paul, and Ringo there if memory serves.

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  4. My oldest granddaughter loved the Teletubbies. We watched them often.

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  5. Emma, I thought it was mindless pap until I read that it’s audience was intended to be pre-verbal children, birth to 18 months, for whom programs like Sesame Street were too advanced.

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  6. Correction: I know that it’s “its” and not “it’s” but the predictive text, to which I should have been paying more attention, did not. A thousand pardons.

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  7. Very sad news indeed, but nowhere near as surprising as the news that Barney the Dinosaur is now a tantric sex therapist in California.

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  8. Ian, in the game of one-upmanship you are definitely are winning.

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

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