Bill and Ben
Not much happens in The Flowerpot Men. The gardener goes for his
dinner. Bill and Ben pop out of their flowerpots, speaking a language of
“flibbadobs” and “flobbodobs”. Little Weed whines: “Weeeeed.”
But the innocuous plotlines belie the controversy behind the 1952 show, which
had people fighting to their deathbed and beyond to claim the title of
creator.
It is generally accepted that Hilda Brabben, a headmistress, sold some stories
about two boys called Bill and Ben to the BBC in 1951. The stories, based on
her younger brothers William and Benjamin, were broadcast on Radio 4’s Listen
with Mother.
A year later, the head of BBC children’s television, Freda Lingstrom, and her
living partner (but not, insists Lingstom’s adopted daughter, her lover)
Maria Bird, developed the Flowerpot Men.
When Brabben died in 2002, at the age of 88, and was hailed in her obituaries
as the “original creator” of the programme, lawyers for Lingstrom, who died
in 1989, went into action. The media, including the BBC, began receiving
letters from Lingstom’s estate: “[Brabben’s] stories do not involve
flowerpot men, a gardener, weed, made-up language or anything else that
anyone would associate with The Flowerpot Men. . . The word
‘flobbo-dob’ . . . does not appear.”
The Clangers
They may have been psychedelic pink aliens living on a distant planet, but the
creation of The Clangerswas a more down-to-earth affair.
Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin lived at either end of a village outside
Canterbury when they came up with the idea in 1969. They used Firmin’s barn
for the set and Postgate’s cellar to record the distinctive, fluty Clanger
whistles. Firmin’s wife knitted the aliens.
Forty years later, Postgate and Firmin are still reaping the benefits of the
show, which quickly became a classic. “We approve all the merchandising –
and we accept the cheques,” says Firmin. He and Postgate still live in the
village and talk daily. Between them they have six children and growing
numbers of grandchildren.
Firmin was a “hard-up” artist in 1958 when Postgate approached him to “draw
lots of mice for very little money” for an ITV programme. Their partnership
produced Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nogand Bagpuss.
But, says Firmin: “This life-making animation interrupted my real passion for
printmaking.” It is that to which the 79-year-old is finally returning. He
is working on an exhibition with his daughter, Hannah – the artist who
created the cover for Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’
Detective Agency.
Ludwig
Arguably even more bizarre than the Clangers was Ludwig, an egg-shaped
gemstone with retractable limbs, a helicopter blade for flying, and a
penchant for Beethoven symphonies.
The alien egg, which first appeared on the BBC in 1977, was created by Mirek
Lang and his son, Peter. The family arrived in Britain in 1968, after being
forced to flee the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In his native country,
Lang produced news programmes and documentaries. In Britain, without any
English, he turned to animation.
“He couldn’t speak English very well so he came up with this idea that didn’t
need language, which was like a made-up documentary about what happens when
this thing arrives in the woods,” says Peter, now 52. “But I did the artwork
because he couldn’t draw.”
After Ludwig, Peter Lang continued in children’s television, working on
programmes such as Pigeon Street and Rub a Dub Dub, and is now
in the middle of a new 3-D children’s series to be aired this summer. “I
love what I do,” he says, “but there’s a different agenda now in children’s
television. The commercial consideration is so important. With Ludwig
we just had an annual and a couple of jigsaws.”
The Wombles
Decades before the West went green, the Wombles had recycling figured out.
With the motto “make good use of bad rubbish”, the pointy-nosed animals
reused rubbish in ways so inspiring that children across the country began
organising Womble clearing-up groups.
“I did a lot for recycling - well, actually the Wombles did,” says Elisabeth
Beresford, the author of the Wombles books.
Beresford had the idea for the Wombles during a walk on Wimbledon Common. “My
daughter Kate pounded up to me and said, ‘Ma, isn’t it great on Wombledon
Common?’ ” Beresford wrote 24 Wombles books, and the BBC Womblesanimation
first aired in 1973. She has continued to write children’s books, as well as
a series of steamy adult novels, which she loved writing because “you can
get away with so much more than in children’s books”.
In 1998 Beresford received an MBE from the Queen: “I was terrified. I couldn’t
speak. Then she started talking to me, ‘I really think that Great Uncle
Bulgaria is far too much trouble . . .’ and she just went on and on and on!”
Beresford now lives in a cottage on the Channel Island of Alderney, and is
writing her autobiography.
Thomas and Friends
In 1943 Wilbert Awdry’s son Christopher contracted measles and Awdry, a
Birmingham curate, took on the task of entertaining him.
Like his father, Awdry was a “keen railway man” and the stories that came out
of Christopher’s darkened room were of steam engines called Edward and
Thomas.
“My mother said they could be published,” says Awdry’s daughter, Hilary
Fortnam, 61. “My father didn’t agree, but eventually somebody took them on.
He was delighted!”
Awdry was paid £25 for his first book, The Three Railway Engines.He
wrote a further 26 books before, as Fortnam says, he “ran out of ideas”.
The television show started in 1984. By this time the rights to the stories
had been sold and resold and the family had all but lost control of the
brand. “My father watched the first episode, but the stories changed so he
didn’t like it,” says Fortnam.
Awdry was appointed OBE in 1996 but osteoporosis prevented him from travelling
to London. He died, aged 86, in 1997. His son Christopher, 67, continued
writing for the Railway series and has just finished the 41st book. Both he
and Fortnam have grandchildren now, who, Fortnam says, are “certainly being
raised in the railway tradition”.
Fireman Sam
Firemen were not popular in Brixton in April 1981. The South London district
was ablaze with rioting and fire crews trying to douse the flames were being
pelted with petrol bombs. Dozens of appliances were damaged and several
firemen injured.
For two London Brigade firemen at the time, Dave Gingell and Dave Jones, it
was all wrong. Firemen were the “heroes next door”, says Gingell, “so we
came up with the idea of Fireman Sam to promote firemen to young children.”
The idea was taken on by Mike Young, the Welsh producer behind SuperTed, and
the artist Rob Lee, who, says 62-year-old Gingell, took their concept and
“made a professional job of it”. Gingell and Jones’s input was “mainly on
the fire brigade side of things”.
The first show appeared on Welsh television – in Welsh – in 1985 and has since
been sold to more than 40 countries, as well as the Arabic TV channel
al-Jazeera.
But Gingell and Jones were not television men. They were firemen and they
continued at Clerkenwell Fire Station, London, until retirement, selling the
rights to Fireman Sam in 2001. Gingell lives in Kent and has just celebrated
his ruby wedding anniversary. Jones runs a restaurant in the Algarve.
Bob the Builder
Bob the Builder changed Keith Chapman’s life. A year and a half after the show
he created first aired in 1999, he and his wife Kirsty, previously a “normal
young London couple with a mortgage and small kids”, moved into a
five-bedroom detached house in Putney, an impossibly smart area of South
London (they recently sold the house for more than £2 million). They sent
their three sons to private school, and Chapman, 49, set up his own company,
Chapman Entertainment.
The idea for Bob came to Chapman in 1984 when he saw a builder digging up the
road in Wimbledon village. “Since I was young I’d had a gut feeling that one
day I would crack an idea that would become world-famous,” he says. “When
Bob came along, I thought maybe this could be the one.”
It was. The programme shows in about 200 countries and has made hundreds of
millions of pounds in merchandise sales. Chapman’s subsequent creations, Fifi
and the Flower-tots and Roary the Racecar, are proving similarly
successful. He is now working on a comedy show for boys, an action movie and
an adult animated sitcom.
“Yep,” says Chapman. “ Bob the Builder kind of
changed my life.”
SpongeBob Squarepants
In 2007, seven years after it premiered on British television, SpongeBob
SquarePants was listed by Timemagazine as one of the greatest
television shows of all time. It was never meant to be this way. Bob is a
bucktoothed, biologically incorrect sea sponge and his creator, Stephen
Hillenburg, is a floppy-haired Californian marine biologist.
After he graduated from university in 1984, Hillenburg spent three years
teaching children at a marine institute. He saw how fascinated they were by
“the oddballs of the sea” – sponges, starfish and sea cucumbers – and
SpongeBob was born.
“Though now, of course, I’m misinforming people about what a sponge is,” says
Hillenburg, 46. “I drew these natural sponges for a while . . . but it
didn’t come together until I drew a sink sponge one day.”
The cartoon now shows in more than 170 countries, a SpongeBob movie was
released in 2004 and production on a tenth series is under way.
“This show is so big that if I didn’t create it, I’d have to hate it,” says
Hillenburg.
He officially left the show in 2004, but remains involved. He lives in
southern California with his wife and son and spends his days snorkelling,
surfing and scuba diving.
