Bod (TV series)
Bod is a British children's television programme first shown on BBC1 in 1975, with thirteen episodes, based on four original Bod books by Joanne and Michael Cole. It is a cutout animated cartoon series narrated by John Le Mesurier and Maggie Henderson with music by Derek Griffiths and produced by David Yates.
Characters
The character of Bod is a boy who lives in a town with Aunt Flo, PC Copper, Frank the Postman and Farmer Barleymow. Each of the characters has their own theme music performed by Griffiths which is heard when they appear. Regular features are animal identification and Bod Snap.Episodes
All thirteen Bod episodes have been released on DVD.Alberto Frog
There is also another segment which appears with each episode called Alberto Frog and his Amazing Animal Band with artwork by Joanne Cole. This section, narrated by Maggie Henderson, features short extracts from famous pieces of classical music as part of the story, and usually ends with Alberto choosing a different flavour of milkshake as his reward for solving a problem.The Alberto Frog segments were produced separately by the BBC and were originally shown alongside the Bod episodes; only five of these thirteen segments are known to survive, following a decision in the early 1990s to wipe a large amount of videotaped 1970s children's programmes.
The five surviving segments are marked above with an asterisk and are present on the Bod DVD. Another was recovered from an old VHS tape and is available on YouTube, and a further full episode - Bod and the Grasshopper - appeared in 2020.
Tie-ins and Taoism
As well as books for each of the televised episodes, there have been two other tie-in books based on Bod, by Alison and Lo Cole, the children of creators Joanne and Michael Cole. Bod's Way: The Meaning of Life was being worked on by Michael Cole before he died in 2001, and was completed by Alison.The books reveal the Taoist beliefs of Bod's original creators.