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Flower Pot Men is a British television programme for young children created by Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird, under their production company Westerham Arts. It was made at Lime Grove Studios,[1] and was first transmitted by the BBC on 12 December 1952.[2] A year later it joined the cycle of programmes broadcast under the title of Watch With Mother
Cycle of children's television programmes broadcast by the BBC from 1953 until 1973., occupying the Wednesday slot.[3] Episodes of the Flower Pot Men were produced until 1954, and then regularly repeated.[1]
The Flower Pot Men were Bill and Ben, two puppets made of flower pots and wearing hobnailed boots and gardening gloves. They lived in large flower pots at the bottom of a garden, either side of their friend Little Weed, retreating back into their flower pots whenever Little Weed warned them that the gardener was returning from his dinner. The puppets were identical, distinguished only by the names written on their backs, and Bill’s voice being more highly pitched than Ben’s. They spoke in their own gibberish language, known as Oddle Poddle, with stories described by a narrator.[1][2][4]
Each programme featured the same “reassuring rituals”, from the appearance of Bill and Ben from their pots to the closing caption of “Goodbye”. In between, Bill and Ben engaged in various “slapstick antics”, culminating in the narrator asking which of the flower pot men had done a particular thing in the preceding story, accompanied by the song “Was it Bill or was it Ben?”[2]
Production
The programme was narrated by Maria Bird, who also wrote the music and songs, sung by Gladys Whitred; the puppeteers were Audrey Atterbury and Molly Gibson. The Flower Pot Men‘s voices were provided by Peter Hawkins,[5] who developed their “nonsensical if rationalised dialect”, such as calling an icicle an “ickle-kickle”, and the often used nonsense word “flobbadob”.[2] Some parents complained that Oddle Poddle would encourage poor language skills among children,[4] an argument repeated with the arrival of Teletubbies forty years later.[2]
A stop-motion remake of the programme, titled Bill and Ben, was broadcast in 2001.[1]
Controversy
A long-running dispute over who actually created the Flower Pot Men came to a head in 2002, when in obituaries of the retired headteacher Hilda Brabban she was credited as their “original creator”; lawyers acting for Freda Lingstrom’s estate ordered obituary writers to “correct” their tributes to Hilda Brabban. The BBC retracted its obituary, which had been published in its in-house magazine Ariel, clarifying that “while Hilda Brabben might have written stories for the BBC in 1940, she did not have a connection with the Bill and Ben and Watch with Mother characters created by Freda Lingstrom in the 1950s”.[6]
References
Works cited
External links
- “Cabbages” episode at YouTube
