The Flowerpot Men
Encyclopedia
The Flower Pot Men is a British
children's programme, produced by BBC
television
, first transmitted in 1952, and repeated regularly for more than twenty years, which was produced in a new version in 2000. The show was the basis for a comic strip of the same name in the children's magazine Robin
.
titled Watch with Mother
, with a different programme each weekday, most of them involving string puppets. The Flower Pot Men was the story of two little men made of flower pots who lived at the bottom of an English suburban
garden. The characters were devised by Freda Lingstrom
and Maria Bird. Three later stories were written by Hilda Brabban. The puppeteers were Audrey Atterbury
and Molly Gibson. The voices and other noises were produced by Peter Hawkins
, Gladys Whitred and Julia Williams. The narration for all episodes was done by Maria Bird.
The plot changed little in each episode. The programme always took place in a garden
, behind a potting shed. The third character was Little Weed
, of indeterminate species, somewhat resembling a sunflower
or dandelion with a smiling face, growing between two large flowerpots. The three were also sometimes visited by a tortoise
called Slowcoach. While the "man who worked in the garden
" was away having his dinner the two Flower Pot Men, Bill and Ben, emerged from the two flowerpots. After a minor adventure a minor mishap occurs; someone is guilty. "Which of those two flower pot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?" the narrator trills, in a quavering soprano
; the villain confesses; the gardener's footsteps are heard coming up the garden path; the Flower Pot Men vanish into their pots and the closing credits
roll. The final punch-line was, "and I think the little house knew something about it! Don't you?"
The Flower Pot Men spoke their own, highly inflected version of English
, called Oddle Poddle. However, the popular notion that they ever said "Flobbalob" or "Flobbadob" is an urban myth; if one listened carefully to their banter, one could hear words like "Loblob" ("lovely") and "Flobberpop" ("flowerpot"), either of which could have given rise to the urban myth. At the end of each adventure, they would say bye-bye to each other and to the Little Weed - "Babap ickle Weed" - to which the Weed would inevitably reply with tremulous cadence
"Weeeeeeeeeeed". This language, like that of the Teletubbies
in the 1990s, was invented by Peter Hawkins
(who also voiced the Daleks) and was criticised for hindering children from learning proper English.
, this time involving stop-motion animation and full colour, and made by Cosgrove Hall Films
with a team of ten animators. Bill and Ben was narrated by voice actor Jimmy Hibbert
.
Many additions were implemented:
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
children's programme, produced by BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
, first transmitted in 1952, and repeated regularly for more than twenty years, which was produced in a new version in 2000. The show was the basis for a comic strip of the same name in the children's magazine Robin
Robin (magazine)
Robin was a British weekly children's magazine published from 1953 to 1969, originally by Hulton Press. Associated annuals were also produced, the first dated 1954, until at least the ninth in 1962...
.
Original series
Originally, the programme was part of a BBC children's television seriesChildren's television series
Children's television series, are commercial television programs designed for, and marketed to children, normally scheduled for broadcast during the morning and afternoon when children are awake. They can sometimes run in the early evening, for the children that go to school...
titled Watch with Mother
Watch with Mother
Watch With Mother was a cycle of children's programmes broadcast from 1952 by BBC Television which was created by Freda Lingstrom.It was the first BBC television programme specifically aimed at pre-school children, like its radio equivalent Listen with Mother that also started in 1950...
, with a different programme each weekday, most of them involving string puppets. The Flower Pot Men was the story of two little men made of flower pots who lived at the bottom of an English suburban
SubUrbia
subUrbia is a play by Eric Bogosian chronicling the nighttime activities of a group of aimless 20-somethings still living in their suburban Boston hometown and their reunion with a former high school classmate who has become a successful musician...
garden. The characters were devised by Freda Lingstrom
Freda Lingstrom
Freda Violet Lingstrom OBE was a BBC Television producer and executive who was responsible for pioneering children's programmes in the early 1950s....
and Maria Bird. Three later stories were written by Hilda Brabban. The puppeteers were Audrey Atterbury
Audrey Atterbury
Audrey Selma Atterbury was a British puppeter best known for her work on the 1950s pioneering BBC's children's series Andy Pandy....
and Molly Gibson. The voices and other noises were produced by Peter Hawkins
Peter Hawkins
Peter John Hawkins was an English actor and voice artist.- Career :Born in London and a native of Brixton, Hawkins' long association with British children's television began in 1952 when he voiced both Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. In 1955–1956, He voiced Big Ears & Mr. Plod from The...
, Gladys Whitred and Julia Williams. The narration for all episodes was done by Maria Bird.
The plot changed little in each episode. The programme always took place in a garden
Garden
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials. The most common form today is known as a residential garden, but the term garden has...
, behind a potting shed. The third character was Little Weed
Weed
A weed in a general sense is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-controlled settings, especially farm fields and gardens, but also lawns, parks, woods, and other areas. More specifically, the term is often used to...
, of indeterminate species, somewhat resembling a sunflower
Sunflower
Sunflower is an annual plant native to the Americas. It possesses a large inflorescence . The sunflower got its name from its huge, fiery blooms, whose shape and image is often used to depict the sun. The sunflower has a rough, hairy stem, broad, coarsely toothed, rough leaves and circular heads...
or dandelion with a smiling face, growing between two large flowerpots. The three were also sometimes visited by a tortoise
Tortoise
Tortoises are a family of land-dwelling reptiles of the order of turtles . Like their marine cousins, the sea turtles, tortoises are shielded from predators by a shell. The top part of the shell is the carapace, the underside is the plastron, and the two are connected by the bridge. The tortoise...
called Slowcoach. While the "man who worked in the garden
Man Who Worked in the Garden
The Man Who Worked in the Garden was a pivotal unseen character in the long-running BBC children’s television series, The Flower Pot Men, one of the programmes broadcast weekly from 1952 as part of the daily slot, Watch with Mother....
" was away having his dinner the two Flower Pot Men, Bill and Ben, emerged from the two flowerpots. After a minor adventure a minor mishap occurs; someone is guilty. "Which of those two flower pot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?" the narrator trills, in a quavering soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
; the villain confesses; the gardener's footsteps are heard coming up the garden path; the Flower Pot Men vanish into their pots and the closing credits
Closing credits
Closing credits or end credits are added at the end of a motion picture, television program, or video game to list the cast and crew involved in the production. They usually appear as a list of names in small type, which either flip very quickly from page to page, or move smoothly across the...
roll. The final punch-line was, "and I think the little house knew something about it! Don't you?"
The Flower Pot Men spoke their own, highly inflected version of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, called Oddle Poddle. However, the popular notion that they ever said "Flobbalob" or "Flobbadob" is an urban myth; if one listened carefully to their banter, one could hear words like "Loblob" ("lovely") and "Flobberpop" ("flowerpot"), either of which could have given rise to the urban myth. At the end of each adventure, they would say bye-bye to each other and to the Little Weed - "Babap ickle Weed" - to which the Weed would inevitably reply with tremulous cadence
Cadence
Cadence may refer to:Music:*Cadence , a melodic configuration the end of a phrase, section, or piece of music*Cadence Magazine, a monthly review of jazz, blues and improvised music...
"Weeeeeeeeeeed". This language, like that of the Teletubbies
Teletubbies
Teletubbies is a BBC children's television series targeted at pre-school viewers and produced from 1997 to 2001 by Ragdoll Productions. It was created by Ragdoll's creative director Anne Wood CBE and Andrew Davenport, who wrote each of the show's 365 episodes. The programme's original narrator was...
in the 1990s, was invented by Peter Hawkins
Peter Hawkins
Peter John Hawkins was an English actor and voice artist.- Career :Born in London and a native of Brixton, Hawkins' long association with British children's television began in 1952 when he voiced both Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. In 1955–1956, He voiced Big Ears & Mr. Plod from The...
(who also voiced the Daleks) and was criticised for hindering children from learning proper English.
2001 series
On 2 January 2001, a second series named Bill and Ben began on CBBCCBBC
CBBC is one of two brand names used for the BBC's children's television strands. Between 1985 and 2002, CBBC was the name given to all the BBC's programmes on TV for children aged under 14...
, this time involving stop-motion animation and full colour, and made by Cosgrove Hall Films
Cosgrove Hall Films
Cosgrove Hall Films was a British animation studio based in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, that once was a major producer of children's television programmes. Cosgrove Hall's programmes are still seen in over eighty countries...
with a team of ten animators. Bill and Ben was narrated by voice actor Jimmy Hibbert
Jimmy Hibbert
James "Jimmy" Hibbert is an English television writer and voice actor best known for his work for Cosgrove Hall.He was brought up and educated at Leighton Park School and in Henley-on-Thames and later studied at the University of Manchester achieving a BA in drama...
.
Many additions were implemented:
- A mean rosebushRosebushRosebush may refer to:* The rose plant* Rosebush, Pembrokeshire, Wales* Rosebush, Michigan, United States...
with budBudIn botany, a bud is an undeveloped or embryonic shoot and normally occurs in the axil of a leaf or at the tip of the stem. Once formed, a bud may remain for some time in a dormant condition, or it may form a shoot immediately. Buds may be specialized to develop flowers or short shoots, or may have...
s in the neighbour's garden named Thistle. - A magpieMagpieMagpies are passerine birds of the crow family, Corvidae.In Europe, "magpie" is often used by English speakers as a synonym for the European Magpie, as there are no other magpies in Europe outside Iberia...
named Pry, obsessed by shiny treasures, often just bottle caps. - A hedgehogHedgehogA hedgehog is any of the spiny mammals of the subfamily Erinaceinae and the order Erinaceomorpha. There are 17 species of hedgehog in five genera, found through parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and New Zealand . There are no hedgehogs native to Australia, and no living species native to the Americas...
named Boo. - A wormWormThe term worm refers to an obsolete taxon used by Carolus Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for all non-arthropod invertebrate animals, and stems from the Old English word wyrm. Currently it is used to describe many different distantly-related animals that typically have a long cylindrical...
named Whoops. - A talking tomatoTomatoThe word "tomato" may refer to the plant or the edible, typically red, fruit which it bears. Originating in South America, the tomato was spread around the world following the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and its many varieties are now widely grown, often in greenhouses in cooler...
named Ketchup. - Weed is no longer a weedWeedA weed in a general sense is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-controlled settings, especially farm fields and gardens, but also lawns, parks, woods, and other areas. More specifically, the term is often used to...
, but an enormous sunflowerSunflowerSunflower is an annual plant native to the Americas. It possesses a large inflorescence . The sunflower got its name from its huge, fiery blooms, whose shape and image is often used to depict the sun. The sunflower has a rough, hairy stem, broad, coarsely toothed, rough leaves and circular heads...
. Rather than whining, "Weed!", she spoke proper English. She played an "earth mother" role to Bill and Ben. She often assisted them.
UK VHS releases
| VHS title | Release date | Episodes |
|---|---|---|
| Bill and Ben Flower Pot Men (BBCV 4208) | 1989 | Musical Vegetables, Scarecrow, Flying Boots, Icicles |
| Bill and Ben Flower Pot Men 2: Tales from the Bottom of the Garden (BBCV 4362) | 1990 | Bath in Hat, Cabbages, Bellows, Stickmen |
| The Very Best of Bill and Ben Flower Pot Men (BBCV 5106) | 1993 | Stickmen, Scarecrow, Bath in Hat, Musical Vegetables, Cabbages |
| Bill and Ben: Garden Games (BBCV [Unknown Number]) | 2001 | Weed Sees The World, Phwoaarr, Here Comes the Sun, Ben Has a Visitor, Treasure Garden |
External links
- Toonhound on the Flowerpot Men
- CBeebies - Bill and Ben at bbc.co.ukBbc.co.ukBBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize...
- Whirligig TV
- British Film Institute Screen Online
- The Museum of Broadcast Communication