![]() They spoke gibberish – The “flobbadob” language, which was invented by Peter Hawkins, who also supplied the voices for Bill and Ben and had worked on Captain Pugwash and later provided the ‘voices’ for The Daleks on Doctor Who.Īs with Andy Pandy , the creative forces behind Bill and Ben were Freda Lingstrom – then head of Children’s Television programmes at the BBC – and her old friend Maria Bird, who together formed Westerham Arts.Īudrey Atterbury (who pulled the strings) and Peter Hawkins originally rehearsed the show on Freda’s garden wall at Chartwell near Westerham in Kent – because it was the right height for the puppets.įrom 1955 to 1958 rehearsals and filming took place in a tin shed at the BBC Lime Grove Studio complex. The two puppet men had legs made out of upside-down flowerpots and oversized gloves and hobnail boots. It was never satisfactorily explained why Bill and Ben lived in fear of this (unseen) man or why they clambered back into their pots so frantically to hide on his imminent approach. The adventures of this pair of strange, stringed puppet creatures living in flowerpots at the bottom of the garden first aired in December 1952.Īndy Pandy might have had Teddy and Looby Loo (who was never alive whenever anybody was around anyway) but The Flowerpot Men had Little Weed who stood between them and kept watch for the evil “man who worked in the garden”. Wednesday’s Watch With Mother featured the twin pot-dwellers Bill and Ben.
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