Flower Pot Men
Flower Pot Men is a British programme for young children produced by BBC Television. It was first transmitted in 1952, and repeated regularly for more than twenty years. A remake of the programme called Bill and Ben was broadcast in 2001.
The original programme was part of a BBC children's television series titled Watch with Mother, featuring a different programme each weekday, most of them involving string puppets.
Premise
Flower Pot Men features the story of Bill and Ben, two men made of terracotta flower pots who live at the bottom of an English garden. A third character, Little Weed, of indeterminate species resembling either a sunflower or a dandelion with a smiling face, is shown growing between two large flowerpots. The three are also sometimes visited by a tortoise called Slowcoach and, in one particular episode, the trio meet a faintly mysterious character made out of potatoes, Dan the Potato Man.Typically, while the "man who worked in the garden" would be away having his dinner, the two flower pot men, Bill and Ben, would emerge from their pots. After a minor adventure, a slight mishap would occur, for which someone would then take the blame: "Which of these two flowerpot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?" the narrator would trill in a quavering soprano; the culprit would then confess, before the gardener's footsteps would be heard coming up the garden path; the flower pot men then would vanish into their pots and the "Goodbye" screen would appear. The final punch-line was, "..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?".
Production
According to her adopted daughter Alison Gassier, Freda Lingstrom got the idea for the show after spending time in her woodshed with a flowerpot. She assembled the production crew, which consisted mainly of those who had worked on her previous show Andy Pandy: her associate Maria Bird, who wrote the songs and music and narrated, puppeteers Audrey Atterbury and Molly Gibson, and singers Gladys Whitred and Julia Whitaker. The only new member was Peter Hawkins, who voiced both Bill and Ben, inventing their gibberish language, named Oddle-Poddle. He based the language on select words such as "Slogalog" and "Haddap".The puppets were made to look as if they were made from flowerpots. Cupcake holders were used for their hats, which sometimes caught onto their strings. Peter particularly praised Audrey's puppetry for being very precise. The scripts were written in English, with Peter translating them into Oddle-Poddle.