Watch with Mother
FULL OF THE JOYS OF STRING
words Tim Worthington
Watching archive television, it is often said, is somewhat like peering through a window onto the past, with vintage programmes unwittingly but perfectly capturing and isolating the fashions, obsessions, attitudes and even technical standards of the era in which they were made. This has been said somewhat less often about the original BBC Video catalogue from the mid-1980s, but in reality it is no less true. From its easily-tarnished silver-grey cover (surely familiar to legions of "Doctor Who" fans who were somewhat bafflingly sent copies in response to irate and overdramatic complaints to Michael Grade over the 'cancellation crisis') onwards, the stiff-papered brochure is a fascinating document of a long-lost primitive era in home entertainment. Most of the titles that it lists have higher price tags than the average three DVD box set would retail for nowadays, there are some incongruous and baffling items (not least live videos by Toyah and Yes, which would be the exclusive preserve of the record company nowadays), and there are countless releases for then-recent shows - amongst them Barry Letts' nightmarish art-nouveau restaging of "Pinocchio" with a noticeable lack of cheery songs - that have since been almost entirely forgotten about and would struggle to get within scene-selecting distance of a commercial release nowadays.
As the above mentioned catalogue illustrates, the BBC initially appeared to be unsure of how to respond to the mass popularity of this new young upstart medium in the world of home entertainment. Possibly wary of its potential for misuse by those once-feared copyright-flouting ‘video pirates’, and indeed by its potential to distract viewers away from their live television output, the BBC’s early video releases were generally odd choices - seemingly only cleared for release after having been assessed by several successive review panels armed with some outdated audience research figures printed upside down and back to front on the charred side of an unevenly toasted slice of bread - and retailing at ludicrously and possibly deliberately prohibitive prices. Few people in their right mind would have forked out the best part of thirty quid for the chance to own a handful of edited-together episodes of the lightweight Children’s BBC drama “The Baker Street Boys” (some kind of unofficial Sherlock Holmes-spinoff featuring Stanley Lebor from “Ever Decreasing Circles” as Inspector Lestrade and a young Adam Woodyatt as ‘Shiner’, one of the titular ‘boys’), and judging from the fact that no copies of “Pinocchio” ever seem to show up in second hand shops it would appear to have enjoyed similar levels of public popularity, but even the more potentially profitable shows were generally represented by perplexing choices that were hardly likely to fly off the shelves.
This all changed, however, with the arrival in the late 1980s of two titles whose success took everyone - including BBC Enterprises - by surprise. The first was the “Doctor Who” story ‘Death To The Daleks’; sales of previous releases of the series had reputedly been comparatively healthy, even if the BBC had opted for largely nondescript and undistinguished stories interspersed with the odd classic rendered pointless through being released in a savagely edited repeat compilation version (quite possibly a panic measure in response to the then-recent press furore about ‘Video Nasties’, but that’s a whole other article in itself), but when they shrewdly decided to put a Dalek story straight out at ‘budget’ (i.e. ‘normal’ by modern standards) price, it rocketed straight to the top of the sell-through video chart and led to a hasty round of promotional appearances by Jon Pertwee in full costume at various HMVs, Our Prices and Virgin Megastores (where presumably, as these were video rather than book signings, he managed to avoid collapsing). “Doctor Who”, Daleks and cheapness (of the financial rather than budgetary variety, but in this case it still holds true for that interpretation too), though, were always guaranteed to be a profitable combination, appealing both to fans who were keen to see the story, and to fans who were keen to thrust the cassette quite violently into the faces of unsuspecting passers-by asking "is it 'Day'?". The other title released around the same time that helped opened the BBC’s eyes to the real commercial potential of home video was a more unlikely and unexpected success - “Watch With Mother”.
Essentially a compilation volume featuring one edition each of the original five shows from the BBC’s long-running midday “Watch With Mother” slot (or at least 'long-running' from 1950 up to 1980, when it was decided that the title was somewhat patronising in the age of the working mother, and the slot mutated into "See Saw", of legendarily visibly-sellotaped-murky-old-illustrations-of-Gabriel-the-Toad-et-al shoddy continuity slide notoriety), the video was released shortly before Christmas in 1987, and promptly sold out everywhere. This is of course a familiar scenario at the time of year when sleighbells ring, snow glistens and in better days Noel Edmonds was suddenly all over television, but in this instance the selling out was not of a gimmicky toy with functionless lights attached. Rather it was of a video cassette made up entirely of the black and white material that, only a few years previously, the ‘pundits’ had been claiming was utterly worthless. Nostalgia fever had well and truly set in over a handful of clanking puppets who mostly hadn’t been seen on the small screen for the best part of twenty years, and following its success the BBC suddenly started to take its commercial video releases very seriously indeed. Bad news for anyone who had looked forward to the day when they could spend a ridiculous amount of money on the mediocre “Doctor Who” story ‘Underworld’, not to mention for ‘Shiner’, but good news for just about everyone else.
So, who exactly were these puppets, the brave unsung heroes whom we have to thank for the fact that it is now possible to get Dennis Potter plays, “Doctor Who” and, erm, “Three Up Two Down” on DVD at an affordable price and with tons of extras? Well, “Watch With Mother” effectively began as “Listen With Mother”, a regular stories-for-children slot on the BBC Light Programme (itself essentially what Radio 2 was called in ‘old money’). Broadcast at 13:45pm every weekday, “Listen With Mother” - often confused with “Children’s Hour”, a more wide-ranging show on the same station that concentrated on light comedy and drama and was mostly aimed at a slightly older audience - basically consisted of some tinkly opening music, and a presenter asking “are you sitting comfortably? - then I’ll begin” before going on to sing a couple of songs, recite a couple of poems, and read out a specially-written story about such exciting-sounding characters as Mitten The Kitten, My Naughty Little Sister and The Yompity Yo, the latter of whom apparently provoked some kind of national outcry after he broke into a house to steal back a recording of his missing voice or something. “Listen With Mother” is one of the most widely and fondly remembered programmes of the ‘Golden Age’ of radio, and even in the face of virtually unbeatable competition from television it managed to survive right through to 1982. However, it now seems to occupy a weird cultural limbo, in which despite its one-time ubiquity it is now rarely referenced or discussed, the only significant evidence of the fact that it ever existed coming courtesy of a handful of commercially available ‘gramophone recordings’ of the show that were released by the BBC.
A significant proportion of the blame for “Listen With Mother” becoming so historically remote and detached must surely lie with its uncouth, brash, flashy small-screen counterpart. Beginning in 1950, the timeslot that would eventually become known as "Watch With Mother" (itself, amusingly, often confused with the similar but different television programming strand "For The Children", which was where Muffin The Mule made his clodhopping piano-lid-scratching name) was originally given the imaginative title "For The Very Young". People may complain (perfectly legitimately) that not enough airtime is given over to thoughtful and considered children's programming even now, but back then "For The Very Young" only went out on Tuesdays, with the occasional foray into the uncharted waters of Thursdays which may or may not have been prompted by that perpetual bane of the lives of hapless viewers, 'live sport'. The sole occupant of the slot at this time was "Andy Pandy", who was joined in 1952 by "The Flower Pot Men", who took over the prestigious 'Wednesday' slot. "Rag, Tag, And Bobtail" crashlanded onto Thursdays in 1953, bringing with them the change of title to "Watch With Mother", and the week's schedules finally became bookended in 1955 by the exciting arrival of multi-million pound signings "Picture Book" on Mondays and "The Woodentops" on Fridays. This rolling schedule, in which the twenty six or so editions of each individual show were repeated countless times, remained in place for around a decade, a tradition that was only broken when "Tales From The Riverbank" was 'upgraded' from the main children's television slot to "Watch With Mother" in 1963, where it began to alternate with "Picture Book". More new shows arrived in the schedules during the mid-late 1960s, and by the launch of the BBC's full colour television service in 1970, the days of the creaky old monochrome prints of the original "Watch With Mother" shows were very much numbered. "Picture Book" and "Rag, Tag, And Bobtail" had been quietly 'retired' some years earlier, no doubt to some shadowy Italianate folly where they were referred to only by numbers and escape was prevented by a giant white balloon and by the fact that it was physically impossible to progress outside the minute set and painted backdrop (or, more likely, to reside on large shelves at the BBC marked "Black and White - Do Not Use!!!"), and both "The Woodentops" and "The Flower Pot Men" spluttered weakly into the early 1970s thanks to early BBC Colour's budget-related reliance on a hefty quotient of monochrome repeats, before being phased out admist the quasi-psychedelic spangly spectacle of Glam Rock, the BBC Schools Diamond and, erm, Spangles. Only "Andy Pandy", who had been afforded the luxury of having his adventures refilmed in colour (reputedly at Abbey Road studios, which if it is true would mean that the episodes were being shot at around the same time as the recording of Pink Floyd's "Ummagumma" and possibly even The Beatles' "Let It Be"), managed to struggle on through the days of disco and punk. Aside from their unexpected dominance of the home video retail market, the only other occasion in recent memory when the original "Watch With Mother" puppets made headlines was when they were stolen en route to an exhibition by someone who, implausibly, tried to sell them at Sotheby's in the apparent belief that no-one would notice. "Picture Book" was of course not involved in this bizarre escapade, and is reputed to have remained very bitter about the whole episode.
Nowadays, those five original "Watch With Mother" shows are the stuff of enormous misty-eyed nostalgia, but are very rarely seen in their complete form. Clips occasionally surface on various television shows with some form of retrospective slant, although they normally come accompanied by some sort of sneering innuendo-driven commentary from losers like Jimmy Carr or Gina Yashere, and in any case do not enjoy anywhere near as much exposure as they did back in the heyday of "Telly Addicts" (an unfairly maligned 1980s Noel Edmonds-fronted BBC1 quiz show that might well have been based around questions about television programmes - cue huge choruses of scoffing from the sort of people who like to scoff at others for being 'sad' - but at least had the decency to present its archive clips uninterrupted and on face value). The phenomenal number of copies of the video and its various associated spinoff releases (which we will come back to later) that were sold were presumably primarily bought by people who remembered the shows from their original transmissions and wanted to see them again, and so effectively there are huge swathes of the viewing populace who are in the unusual position of knowing these shows (or at least their names and their supposed hallmarks) well without having ever actually seen any of them. There are of course a great many copies of the video, which appears to have enjoyed more than one pressing, still around - in fact it is possible to pick a second hand copy up for as little as fifty pence if you look around carefully - so there really isn't any excuse for anyone who claims to have a keen interest in archive children's television not to have a look for themselves, and make their own mind up about whether their creaky reputation is deserved or not. Was it really all a stiffly formal cacophony of tinkly songs and strings of a similar thickness to suspension bridge cable? Did everyone honestly talk like Margaret Thatcher imitating TV's Antiques Boy James Harries whilst addressing a panel of particularly stern and humourless Victorian grandmothers judging an elocution contest? Were they really all on drugs, maaaaaan? There's only one way of finding out, and that's with the aid of a certain video cassette (notice how archiac those words are sounding already) wrapped in a cover that eschewed BBC Video's earlier habit of relying on Sid Sutton-created 'photo montages' in favour of a nice, tasteful illustration that looked almost as though it might once have appeared on the cover of a "Watch With Mother" storybook.
The familiar green and white BBC Video label is reassuringly present, as is the old BBC Video 'star' logo at the start of the tape. However, on this occasion it lacks the expected "Blankety Blank"/Nigel Havers/Noel Edmonds Rehabilitation Game Show Vehicle oh-so-1980s 'squiggly' synthesiser sting, and instead features some vague, nondescript tinkly music in a broadly similar vein. Whilst this is playing, the 'star' changes into black and white, confirming that this change to the normal programme is indeed a hamfisted but ultimately rather endearing attempt at setting the tone for the actual contents of the video. Not that it necessarily does anything to reassure the viewer that the mythology of "Watch With Mother" might be a load of old codswallop after all. The 'star' is followed by the weirdly half-familiar "Watch With Mother" introductory sequence, featuring yet more tinkling (of the musically ascending variety) over a brief glimpse of the words 'Watch', 'With', and 'Mother' superimposed over something that looks like a cross between an opening flower and one of those shower scrub things that are only ever seen in 'gift sets' given to female relatives as last minute Christmas presents.
As the video opts for an historically accurate recreation of a week's scheduling for its feature presentation (take that, so-called 'Restoration Team'!), the first 'day' is - unsuprisingly - Monday, and that can mean only one thing: "Picture Book". The only one of the original "Watch With Mother" shows to feature a human presenter and not to be named after a puppet character or group of puppet characters, "Picture Book" (not to be confused with "Picture Box", the ITV schools' programme that showcased arty 'short films' and was introduced by inexplicably disturbing blurred footage of an ornate rotating red-velvet-lined gilded jewellery box accompanied by fairgroundesque waltz music played on something that sounded like a martian barrell organ) has correspindingly and understandably failed to fare as well in the public memory as its stablemates. So much so, in fact, that a viewer once wrote in to "Fax" - the mid-1980s trivia show fronted by Bill Oddie and regionally famous Radio Merseyside presenter Billy Butler, which went out in BBC1's notoriously difficult 17:35pm slot in the days before they had the idea of putting "Neighbours" there - to ask what the fifth "Watch With Mother" programme was. "Picture Box" hardly gets proceedings off to a good start, opening as it does with stiffly formal and somewhat far from 'jolly' or 'upbeat' classical music played over a dramatically outdated-looking illustration of some dramatically outdated-looking toys. To be fair, a quick glance at the 1980s BBC1 Continuity page at http://www.tv-ark.co.uk/ (and in particular that frankly risible 1981 illustration of some very prim and proper youngsters staring at the day's schedules with an expression of collective glee that seems somewhat at odds with the minimal fare on offer) will confirm that in some respects matters had hardly progressed much in more than two decades after "Picture Book" was made, but this opening sequence is enough to raise concerns that "Watch With Mother" is going to turn out to be exactly as the scoffing dismissive types claim it to be after all. Which is why it comes as no little relief to discover, once the opening titles (which seem to last forever despite probably only totalling around ten seconds at the most) are out of the way, "Picture Book" is surprisingly comparatively well paced.
The show is presented by a polite lady in a comfortable-looking chair, and a puppet clanking around on a desk. The lady in question was originally one Patricia Driscoll, who reputedly used to recieve letters from viewers who were concerned for her welfare as she only ever appeared on television wearing the same outfit; obviously, the concept that they had seen the shows in question several dozen times before had not occurred to those charitable viewers falling over themselves to help out the poor unfortunate. The episode on this video, however, is taken from the second batch of shows made around 1960, and features the elaborately coiffured Vera McKechnie. The puppet, meanwhile, is a sausage dog given the imaginative name 'Sausage'. This particular marionette displays remarkable fludity of movement, especially in the 'reaction shots' featuring its head moving independently of its body, and its strings are not clearly visible, so the myth of inch-thick ropes supporting inarticulate puppets has been challenged by the very first show on this tape. Physical inarticulacy, at least. Verbally, it's a different matter. Sausage 'speaks' in an incomprehensible growl that sounds less like a dog than it does Kevin Eldon playing The Bare-Chested Man Who Stands By The Bottle Bank Drinking Medicine And Shouting in Lee and Herring's Radio 1 shows, and this makes the overall programme slightly difficult to watch with a straight face. On top of this, "Picture Book" does little to disprove the widely-held belief that all presentation-based black and white television was filmed in the same room, only with the furniture moved around slightly each time.
Whether or not this edition is a typical example of the show is difficult to say, but it would appear that “Picture Box” was based around the time-honoured tradition of the Children’s Television ‘make’. Viewers are advised of the implements that they will require if they want to ‘make’ along at home - namely wallpaper, a ruler, glue, a pin, and scissors. Surprisingly, absolutely no warning whatsoever is given about the usage of the latter item, so perhaps in those strange post-War days it was generally assumed that under no circumstances would any child ever be watching “Watch With Mother” without parental supervision. This notion would seem to be confirmed by the sole concession to health and safety featured during the make, namely advice to avoid sticking the pin in your own finger and suggesting that “perhaps you could ask somebody else to help you do that part”. It is interesting to compare this with the fact that by the late-1960s, when the once-prevalent notion that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ was slowly becoming dismissed as the load of old claptrap that it actually is, presenters on the BBC2 show “Play School” were being advised to act as if they were addressing a single child whom had been left at home on their own. Assuming that no pins had actually been stuck in fingers, the 'make' of an indefinable vaguely-shaped paper thing (so some things never change, then) is completed with surprising haste. Sausage barks at it a bit, and then the programme moves into the first story from the so-called Picture Book itself.
Rendered in the most basic cardboard cutout animation imaginable, so much so that it comes across as a humourless and even vaguely sinister mirror image of a Terry Gilliam cartoon, Bizzy Lizzy is a girl with a magic wishing flower on her dress. By touching each of its petals in turn, she is able to wish for "one, two, three, even four things at a time... but not five" - and that's basically all that happens. Whilst barely moving across the screen at all she changes the hour, then changes her mode of dress slightly, decides that she doesn't like the result, and so makes a fifth and final wish that reverts everything back to normal. Presumably, this 'storyline' (if the term can actually be considered to apply in this instance) was trotted out every single week with only the odd word changed here and there. In the late 1960s, after "Picture Book" had pretty much been consigned to a dusty bookshelf with a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker, Bizzy Lizzy became the star of her own "Watch With Mother" spinoff series, in which a puppet version of the indolent piece of cardboard had hazily recalled adventures in the company of her doll. Presumably, these fifteen minute shows must have employed slightly more variety than her earlier small-screen appearances.
Back in the studio, Vera McKechnie unwittingly demonstrates the technical limitations of an era when everything was done live and in black and white (apart from William Hartnell, of course) by asking us to look at a picture while "I fetch something exciting". After a photograph of some chicks backed by tinkly music has remained onscreen for a ludicrous length of time, we return to the studio to find a tray of actual chicks perched on the desk. And this is when it suddenly starts to get very slow indeed, with the camera concentrating on their minimal bodily movements in long, wide-angled shots that don't even have the interest-maintaining benefit of a Johnny Morris-style narration over the top. Following what seems like several hours of mindless tedium, the second animated insert arrives. What's more, it arrives in refreshingly disconcerting surrealist style, opening with a puppet monkey on a desert island headbutting some giant freestanding bottles. Although this initially looks as though it is going to be a welcome excursion into some sort of "Sesame Street"-style freeform absurdist wackiness in the name of education, the monkey is eventually joined by The Jolly Jack Tars, a bunch of slapstick sailors complete with the standard-issue-for-the-time boy puppet speaking with a painfully obvious adult female voice. Judging from the narration and their dialogue, The Jolly Jack Tars are in the middle of some ongoing quest, but whatever they're looking for isn't here so instead they just play some tunes on the bottles and fall over a bit. As with Bizzy Lizzy there isn't much of a narrative to speak of, more of a vignette depicting a minor and inconsequential event in their travels, but unlike Bizzy Lizzy it has a dash of humour - something that, frankly, goes a long way in this world of primitive television. The 'action' then returns to the studio once again, where Patricia picks up Sausage by the neck to berate him for eating cress, and then the show is pretty much over.
'Monday' is out of the way, and 'Tuesday' is again prefaced by that weird 'Watch With Mother' introductory sequence, suggesting that it was actually physically cut into the prints of each show that went out in the timeslot. This particular show is the one that started it all - "Andy Pandy". Like some sort of televisual tribal memory, the contents of this show have been faithfully and inexplicably handed down through successive generations of people who haven't even seen it, so it's scarcely worth providing any sort of an introduction. However, for the benefit of anyone who has been hiding under a rock (or indeed inside a wicker basket) for the past five decades, the titular Andy Pandy is a young boy in a blue and white hooded romper suit, who sings songs and plays games with his friends Teddy and Looby Loo. And now that you've been introduced to it, I hope you enjoy your first experiences of the exciting world of television. There was this programme that went on for twenty six years.
Anyway, as even people who have never actually seen it for themselves will be able to tell you, "Andy Pandy" opens with what is surely one of the simplest yet most effective title sequences ever seen on television; some blocks with flowers on them turn round to reveal the individual letters of the name of the show, positioned around what appears to be a photograph of Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Loo making their way through a Victorian brickwork sewer. Also present amongst this bizarre visual spectacle is the legendary, erm, legend 'Film BBC Unit', a ludicrously bombastically arranged collection of words that ranks with "Police Public Call Box", "Peter Morris Chris Cook" and short-lived imported Channel 4 sitcom "Marshall The Chronicles" in terms of sheer risible stylistic pointlessness. This is of course accompanied by the famous opening song, performed at a much more sprightly pace than popular memory would have you believe. Once a firm favourite in the inevitably limited repertiore of beleagured parents attempting to 'sing' bawling infants into docile submission, the strange fragmentary composition lies somewhere between one of Scott Walker's sweeping existentialist 'mini-songs' and a football terrace chant. Fittingly, while the lyrics "Andy Pandy's coming to play, tra-la-la-la-la-la, Andy Pandy's here today, tra-la-la-la-la" may be cut from somewhat less intellectual cloth than "shame you won't be there to see me, shaking hands with Charles De Gaulle", they are still infused with a far greater degree of intelligence than "ole, ole ole ole".
It soon becomes apparent that in terms of on-screen action, "Andy Pandy" is not really slow as such, but rather has a distracting tendency to focus on a single idea for a ridiculous length of time. The show opens with Andy sitting on a swing, and goes on to depict his enjoyment of swinging backwards and forwards for absolutely ages before he is joined by Teddy. Even then, the entrance of the motheaten bear sporting Colin Baker's Hyperion III tie seems to drag on forever, and following that the swinging continues for even longer with Teddy joining in and pushing his romper-suited chum. The only real relief from the sheer monotony comes when, in a presumably unscripted moment, Teddy is whacked on the head by the undisciplined swing. Both puppets 'address' the camera without actually saying anything - their thoughts are conveyed second-hand by the female narrator - but curiously it is only Teddy that actually seems 'silent' as such. Compounding the sluggish plot development and the lack of direct verbal interaction is the limited physical scale of the programme, which takes place in front of an unmoving painted backdrop on a 'set' that is barely bigger than the two puppets combined. There are also huge gaps in the narration, during which the muted clank of puppet joints and the faraway shuffle of the studio are glaringly audible.
A song about their current activity is sung several times, and Teddy then does a weird high-kicking dance that apparently serves as a request for the traditional rhyme "round and round the garden, like a teddy bear", modified here to incorporate the substitute phrases "walking round the garden" and "jumping in the air" to compensate for the somewhat restricted mobility of the puppets. They do that rhyme about eight million times, and then introduce their doll friend Looby Loo, pushing her pram backwards and forwards for a bit and then standing stock still for absolutely ages. Andy and Teddy disappear for a bit, presumably exhausted after all that failure to move very much at all, and in the absence of her unwitting sentient associates Looby Loo comes to life. Proving that the weird "here we go Looby Loo" song the people are wont to sing for no obvious reason at random moments did actually originate from "Andy Pandy" after all by singing it on a constant loop, Looby Loo dances with her feet off the ground until she gets fed up and returns to her pram. Andy and Teddy then return to bid farewell to the viewers and clamber (or, in Teddy's case, levitate several feet into the air like David Copperfield) into a wicker basket until next time. Quite why they did this has never been adequately explained, although it would have been great to see an episode where their basket was mistakenly collected as laundry and the two puppets were subjected to a full spin cycle. Or where they caught up with Basil Fawlty after he similarly effected a timely escape from Fawlty Towers by hiding inside a wicker basket and being collected as laundry, although to be honest that is probably just daft. The show closes with the opening sequence played in reverse, so that the letters are replaced by the original flower-sporting face of the turning blocks, accompanied by that other familiar song. Although it is not quite as familiar as it should be. It has the same melody, and the same piano-played-by-someone-who-has-to-be-poked-with-a-sharp-stick-every-couple-of-seconds-to-keep-them-awake arrangement, but the lyrics do not adopt the expected refrain "time to go home, time to go home", and instead run "time to stop play, just for today". This would almost certainly have been the case for every edition, so quite how the incorrect version came to become so deeply ingrained on the collective subconscious is something of a mystery. The episode ends, somewhat unnervingly, with a long and lingering soundless shot of the last frame of the title sequence.
Wednesday brings "The Flower Pot Men" (or rather just "Flower Pot Men", if we're to adopt the Andrew Pixley's Archives position and take the opening caption's word for it), which opens with some superb percussion sounds of the sort that now provoke idiot sample-hunting DJs into paying extravagant sums for old soundtrack albums featuring "moogs funks breaks" and unfairly push them outside the availability bracket of people who actually want to own them to listen to. The Flower Pot Men in question are not the ones who had a hit with 'Let's Go To San Francisco' in 1967 and performed on German TV's "Beat Club" wearing kaftans of such 'farout'ness that they interfered with the camera effects, and indeed themselves were no strangers to the aforementioned 'moogs funks breaks' although most of their records were lightweight drivel and not really worth tracking down anyway, but two peculiar humanoid creatures made out of bits of garden implements and named Bill and Ben. Said individuals live inside flowerpots at the bottom of a meticulously tended garden, where they take advantage of the unnvervingly frequent tendency of the Man Who Worked In The Garden to go for breaks by leaping out and exploring their surroundings in the company of their flower friend, Little Weed, and occasionally a tortoise named Slowcoach of whom there seems to be scant visual evidence. They also talk in unintelligible nonsense voices, spouting baffling combinations of consonants that were improvised by voice artist Peter Hawkins around actual scripted English lines.
"The Flower Pot Men" begins with a crudely animated introductory sequence, which features in rapid succession Little Weed, a smiling house, and an artist's impression of the actual 'set' of the programme. This latter inclusion leads to suspicion that the two gangling gibberish-spouting puppet creations are going to have as little space as Andy Pandy and his 'crew' in which to do their gangling and spouting of gibberish, so it comes as no little surprise to discover that they in fact have what is by comparison an olympic-sized football stadium to play around in. In fact, even from the outset, "The Flower Pot Men" seems to have a tremendous amount going for it. Aside from those groovy percussion sounds, the film stock is of amazingly high clarity and overall quality, and the narration seems much tighter than that of "Andy Pandy". This is partly the result of having the characters actually 'speaking' (oh, alright then, babbling), and partly that it has more of a structured setup behind the narrative as the two indefinable creatures try to avoid being sighted by the onimous unseen figure of The Man Who Worked In The Garden, presented by implication as some sort of imposing Orwellian character but in actual fact probably nothing more than an overweight middle-aged bloke with a moustache and a knotted hanky on his head, whom if he ever had seen Bill and Ben would have fled the scene shouting "no human being aloive will ever believe the account of what oi've witnessed".
With their sub-"Goon Show" voices burbling away in mock-language throughout, the two incredibly noisy puppets clank around the substantial set in search of "rather silly" (the narrator's words - again, there is an healthy and unexpected dose of rudimentary humour to proceedings) methods for encouraging seeds to grow, dance about wildly to a strangely Frank Zappa-like burst of glockenspiel, and then hide in their flowerpots when they think that said Man Who Worked In The Garden is approaching. There then begins a lengthy guessing game in which one of the two briefly peers out of their flowerpot, and the viewer is invited to guess which one. This is the point at which the show, which has been rattling along at a fair old pace until now, begins to slow down unforgiveably. A very, very elongated song enquires of the audience "Was it Bill? Was it Ben? Bill or Ben?", by the conclusion of which the viewer has had more than enough opportunity to shout "it was Ben!" at the television until they are blue in the face. And, true to form, this entire rigmarole has to be endured more than once. The tempo is not really picked up again, and from then on it just sort of crawls into that semi-famous and invariably badly quoted ending about the Little House from the opening titles smiling because it knew something about their existence.
"Rag, Tag and Bobtail", the forgotten men of the original "Watch Mith Mother" schedules, yawn their way onscreen in particularly dull fashion with the only appearance on the entire video of the sort of stereotypically tinkly 'ice cream van chimes covered in a thick layer of dust' music, which really does call to mind the lost world of black and white television, that scoffing detractors have made fun of for so many years. The 'Rag', 'Tag' and 'Bobtail' of the title - a hedgehog, mouse and rabbit respectively - are three glove puppets who move across the screen with such a lack of haste that they make The Liberator from "Blake's 7" look like it was travelling at twelve hundred times the speed of light. This is even directly alluded to at one point when the narrator describes how "Tag the little mouse came slowly along the path", and the puppet proceeds to illustrate this remark with mind-numbingly tedious attention to detail. The puppets 'talk' to each other in recognisable words, and even have a proper storyline as they try their hand at water-divining, along with a refreshing lack of repetition of songs (in fact, there are no songs at all), but it is all so unbearably visually slow that this seems to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. Even the closing titles apparently gave up and went home in frustration, as the words 'The End' (and indeed 'Film BBC Unit') simply appear superimposed over the action. There isn't really that much to say about "Rag, Tag and Bobtail", as not that much happens in it at all. Books, newspaper articles and websites that gush enthusiastically about rose-tinted memories of the original "Watch With Mother" invariably suddenly go very quiet when it comes to our rodent chums, and throw their name in alongside a brief description before moving on to something else. Although it is by no means a certain explanation, it is entirely possible that this is because its central characters were not 'television creations' as such; there was no outlandishness to their existence, no interaction with dancing teddy bears and certainly no headbutting of bottles. Instead, the simple anthromorphications of familiar woodland creatures could have just wandered in from any rapidly-outdating children's storybook of the day, and if they were looking for cultural longevity then perhaps that's where they should have stayed.
So far, even despite the snail's-pace plodding of "Rag, Tag and Bobtail", all of the concessions to the sneering public image of "Watch With Mother" have been minor, almost subliminal facets of shows that are otherwise perfectly presentable and enjoyable on several other levels, and so the prevalence of this view has not really been adequately accounted for. Until, that is, a complete and comprehensive explanation arrives in the form of the opening titles of "The Woodentops". Over a stiffly formal piano accompaniment, an extremely primly and properly voiced lady introduces each of the eight or so regular characters in turn, whilst they sit around on a bare stage suspended by strings of mirth-inducing thickness and visibility. This, predictably, goes on for an absolute ice age. And there it is - every single lazy sniping joke ever made by the Jimmy Carrs and Ricky Gervaises of this world about a bunch of old television programmes that had the temerity to have been made in another decade with limited technical facilities can ultimately be traced back to this one brief (if endlessly repeated) moment. It's boring, certainly, and in some respects quite amusing (and also oddly sinister) as a spectacle, but does it deserve mean-spirited mockery any more than, say, joke-free comedy shows based around computer animation or 'naturalistic' mock-documentary settings will do in the near future?
Once the overlong introduction is out of the way "The Woodentops" - an enormous family of unashamedly wood-based people (although their close relative The Cuprinol Man never actually made an appearance) who live and work on a farm populated by equally varnish-friendly animals - themselves prove to be an entertaining enough bunch. Particularly welcome is the presence of the surreal ear-flapping, unhinged-voiced Spotty Dog, whose clearly keenly awaited appearances during the course of each episode were no doubt greeted with the same sort of applause and audience excitement as the entrances of contemporaneous radio comedy figures like Bluebottle and Rambling Syd Rumpo; in fact, the entire production comes across as curiously reminiscent of the ensemble radio comedy shows of the day. There are no songs, and plenty of moments of levity, but there is one important thing missing - a storyline. All that seems to happen is that the baby throws its blanket on the ground over and over again, and while Spotty Dog's alarm at this turn of events is a joy to behold, it hardly exactly makes for compelling viewing.
With the week's viewing complete, it is quite obvious what the main (and to be fair, the only) failing of the original "Watch With Mother" shows was, and it isn't even strictly a 'failing' as such; they all succeed and fail on completely different levels. "Picture Book" gets the loose, friendly-rather-than-formal presentational style right and features an impressively varied table of contents, but is marred by a limited budget and similarly limited recording technology that interferes with the intended pace of the show. "Andy Pandy" has characters and songs that were clearly carefully thought out and certainly capture the imagination and imprint themselves on the memory, but fails to do anything of any consequence with them. Some thought has clearly gone into giving "The Flower Pot Men" a much wider physical and intellectual universe to explore, and there is a refreshing touch of levity to proceedings, but it is weighed down by the percieved need to include 'interactive' segments that are too slow even for a Vanilla Fudge record played at 16rpm. "Rag, Tag and Bobtail" manage to overcome the structural and technical flaws of the other shows, but are simply too mundane and ordinary for their own good. Dull introductory sequences aside, "The Woodentops" wisely avoids the ill-advised inclusion of heel-dragging devices for 'involving' the audience and rightly assumes that simply witnessing their activites is involvement enough; it's just that there isn't much activity going on. All of this is perfectly understandable, of course. The shows were early experiments at entertaining children with a new medium, presumably produced by people drawn from the world of writing and performing for children in books, theatre and radio, where they had never encountered such an intensive concentration on the visual aspects of the story. It took time for both sides of the audience divide to become fully adjusted to the various demands the televisual medium, and the fact that it was a continual learning process for the people behind and in front of the camera is underlined by the handful of video releases that appeared in the wake of "Watch With Mother".
The original video was inevitably followed by a second volume, and a two-volume release for the colour "Andy Pandy" (which, it has to be said, looks incredibly weird now - almost as though something from another age is gatecrashing modernity), but it also led to the release of "Watch With Mother: The Next Generation" in 1989. As the title suggests, this compiled a handful of shows culled from the wave of new programmes that began to appear in the slot from the mid-1960s onwards, and it makes for particularly revealing viewing. Barring the reappearance of the 'shower scrub', now revealed by the wonders of BBC Colour to be a sort of yellowish-green in hue and mounted on a blue background, the first inclusion on the tape is "Tales From The Riverbank", a monochrome series that detailed the adventures of Hammy Hamster and his waterside friends, played not by puppets but by actual real rodents. Where this differed from "Rag, Tag and Bobtail", apart from the obvious, was in that the characters were not only given sturdy storylines with hefty injections of excitement and whimsy by narrator Johnny Morris, but were also seen indulging in such activities as driving fast cars, typing on typewriters and piloting hot air balloons. Next up is "Pogle's Wood", an early offering from Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, which features dense, verbose and evocative narration and some beautifully directed animation that turns the jerky motion of its puppet characters into a virtue. "The Herbs" makes the leap into colour with some truly demented characters and equally unhinged comedy running throughout. "Mary, Mungo And Midge" has modern-sounding library music as its soundtrack and is set in a recognisably contemporary world of dual carriageways, elevators and high-rise tower blocks. Finally, "Barnaby" is a beautiful and frankly rather deranged animation about a singing bear that ran away from the circus to become King Of The Birds and wear a cardboard beak (yes, it actually had a running storyline which developed over thirteen weeks and had cliffhangers and everything), ratting along at a manic pace with plenty of background detail, and underpinned by a lavishly orchestrated score that sounds like a "Carry On" film soundtrack that has eaten far too many food additives. All of these shows seem light years in advance of those that they inherited the "Watch With Mother" slot from, and despite featuring technologically outdated animation (although it could be argued that no matter how technologically 'crude' it may seem, the animation of "Mary, Mungo and Midge" actually looks better than that of recent BBC2 unfunny comedy "I Am Not An Animal") they still make for terrific viewing. As if to confirm that this was not a fluke that somehow managed to repeat itself five times, the same was also true of most of the other shows that inherited the timeslot as part of the 'second wave' (in case anyone was wondering, the 'third wave' came in about 1973-75, and introduced "Bod" and "Bagpuss" amongst others). Gordon Murray's 'Trumptonshire' shows had strong and clear storylines and kept their songs (performed with gusto by Brian Cant and guitarist Freddie Phillips) catchy and brief, while "Mr Benn" employed a combination of present-day urban setting with a dash of fantasy, wit, and a brash jazzy soundtrack. Most significant of all, "Fingerbobs" essentially employed the same structure as "Picture Book", but instead featured an avuncular hippyish presenter with a cast of conical 'puppets' attached to the ends of his fingers, who were sent out on hilarious and absurdist quests to collect the raw materials for him to use to make an extremely basic animation that formed the latter third of the show. In keeping with the ideals of the era, the underlying message here was that anyone who wanted to was free to join in, and could use whatever they had to hand to tell their own 'animated' stories. A perfect sense of inclusivity, without any need for tedious overlong guessing games or direct addressing of the camera by puppets who don't even speak anyway. The fact that the opening titles of the show featured simple animation apparently filmed on top of Andy Pandy's closed wicker basket says it all, really.
So, the original "Watch With Mother" shows. They may be slightly difficult for modern audiences to sit through without reaching straight for the fast forward button, but actually watching them reveals that little of the mockery of their supposed stylistic hallmarks actually holds any weight. Victor Lewis-Smith, a comedian (now long since retired into the world of documentary television production) who was actually just about old enough to remember watching the shows, once memorably turned the tables on his lazier contemporaries on his Radio 1 show, with a routine that mocked their attitudes to the shows rather than the shows themselves ("Bill and Ben, Bill and Ben, another boring parody of Bill and Ben"), but even now the sneering continues and if you've bothered to watch them for yourself, it's enough to make you wish that it was legally permissible to physically force newspaper columnists and 'talking heads' to do likewise before they bother opening their mouths to snigger at 'the strings' for the umpteenth time. That said, unless you are prepared to root around second hand shops or bid small fortunes against the 'moogs funks breaks' moneyburners on online auction sites, it isn't actually possible to see the original shows for yourself right at the moment. A DVD box set featuring one episode each of all the various shows to have inhabited the "Watch With Mother/"See Saw" slot would probably sell every bit as well as, say, a certain video cassette did back in the late 1980s. DVD BBC Unit, we're waiting...
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