Flower Pot Men

Did You Know?

• Cupcake holders were used for Bill and Ben's hats, which sometimes caught onto their strings during filming.
• The final punch-line of each episode was, '..and I think the little house knew something about it; don't you?'
• The one-hit wonder group The Flower Pot Men named themselves after the show, causing controversy over possible marijuana references.
• Hilda Brabban's unrelated Bill and Ben characters were broadcast on radio's Listen with Mother in 1951, a year before the Flower Pot Men appeared on TV.

Premise

Bill and Ben are 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, grows between two large flowerpots. They are sometimes visited by a tortoise called Slowcoach and, in one episode, meet Dan the Potato Man, a faintly mysterious character made out of potatoes. While the man who worked in the garden was away having his dinner, Bill and Ben would emerge from their pots. After a minor adventure and mishap, the narrator would ask which flowerpot man was to blame; the culprit would confess, then the gardener's footsteps would be heard, and the flowerpot men would vanish into their pots. The final punch-line was that the little house knew something about it.

Production

Freda Lingstrom got the idea for the show after spending time in her woodshed with a flowerpot, according to her adopted daughter Alison Gassier. She assembled a production crew mainly from her previous show Andy Pandy: associate Maria Bird, who wrote the songs and music and narrated; puppeteers Audrey Atterbury and Molly Gibson; and singers Gladys Whitred and Julia Whitaker. New member Peter Hawkins voiced both Bill and Ben, inventing their gibberish language named Oddle-Poddle, based on select words such as "Slogalog" for Slowcoach and "Haddap" for hello. The puppets were made to look as if from flowerpots, with cupcake holders for hats that sometimes caught on strings. Scripts were written in English, with Peter translating them into Oddle-Poddle.

Confusion with other characters

Hilda Brabban, a retired headteacher, created a different pair of characters also called Bill and Ben, which people have mixed up with the Flower Pot Men. This mix-up appeared in the first versions of two obituaries for Brabban, one in The Independent and another in the BBC’s magazine Ariel, and also on the BBC show QI. In a 2004 episode, host Stephen Fry wrongly said Brabban had named the Flower Pot Men after her younger brothers. All three sources later fixed their mistakes. In the 1950s, Brabban sold three stories about a Bill and Ben to the BBC, but aside from their names, these characters had nothing in common with the Flower Pot Men. Her stories aired on the radio show Listen with Mother in 1951, while the Flower Pot Men first appeared on television’s Watch with Mother in 1952. Freda Lingstrom produced both programs. After suffering a stroke later in life, Brabban claimed she had invented the characters used in the BBC series. This led lawyers for Freda Lingstrom’s estate to threaten legal action if Brabban went on television to spread that claim.