The Small Screen for Small People

(Or, "Fifty Great British Children’s Programmes, ^[1] One Saggy Cloth Cat, and an Unexpected Amount of Custard")

American children of a certain vintage were raised on Saturday-morning cartoons engineered by consultants to move cereal and action figures. British children of the same vintage were handed a knitted family of aliens who live inside a hollow moon and drink soup from its molten core;^[2] a stop-motion postman; a market town whose fire brigade never once put out a fire;^[3] and a bald boy in a triangular yellow smock delivering what is, on rewatch, unmistakably Taoism.^[4]

None of this was an accident, exactly, but none of it was a strategy either. Britain simply built an unusually weird ecology for children’s television. The BBC carried a public-service obligation to educate children without letting them notice they were being educated. ITV, chopped into regional franchises, had a commercial incentive to steal the same audience by being louder, faster, or stranger. And because the entire country had three channels until 1982,^[5] a five-minute program could become a national event rather than one tile among ten thousand in an app.

Nobody had any money, which turned out to help. Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin made Bagpuss (1974–1974), Clangers (1969–1974), and Ivor the Engine (1959–1977) in a disused cow shed^[6] out of cardboard, wool, glue, model railway track, and a frankly load-bearing amount of visible fishing line. The results do not look like products. They look like beloved objects that somebody talked into moving.

The house style of the comedy is the puncturing of the pompous. Danger Mouse (1981–1992) places national security in the paws of a mouse, a hamster, and a chinchilla. Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1989–1994) demotes Robin Hood to a vain coward who sleeps in an eye-mask and puts Marian in charge. Captain Pugwash (1957–1975) is a boastful incompetent kept alive by a cabin boy who never asks for credit. And Mr Benn (1971–1972)^[7] walks into a magical fancy-dress shop,^[8] comes out dressed as a knight, and then declines to slay the dragon on the grounds that it can probably be reasoned with.^[9]

Blue Peter (1958—) taught a generation to build things out of “sticky-back plastic,” a phrase invented purely so that the BBC would never have to say a brand name on air.^[10] Knightmare (1987–1994) sent children into a dungeon wearing a foam helmet and called them “conquestants.” Dick and Dom shouted “bogies” in public. In the Night Garden… (2007–2009) asked Derek Jacobi, a man who won a BAFTA Award for his portrayal of the title character in the series I, Claudius(1976),^[11] to say “Ninky Nonk,” “Tombliboos,” and “Tittifers” with total conviction, and he did it. Even the titles decline to explain themselves: Tiswas (1974–1982) is an acronym that went unconfirmed for thirty-three years.^[12]

Matthew Sweet, writing for The Telegraph, clearly spent much of his childhood indoors and has given all of this a lot of thought. For his troubles, he’s come up with a list of “The 50 greatest children’s TV shows of all time.” His list runs from ChuckleVision (1987–2009) at fifty to Bagpuss at number one, pausing for public-service news, folk horror, anarchic Saturday mornings, knitted aliens, a Peruvian bear, and several creatures whose biological classification is best left to the professionals. Sweet concedes that nostalgia played a part in his rankings and identifies the 1970s as the most fertile period for British children’s television, when the BBC and the ITV franchises were spending real money and real talent to reach people who could not yet vote. He also warns that anyone rejecting his top ten may expect a Paddington hard stare, a Tiswas flan, and the observation that such opinions are fiddlesticks and flapdoodle.

That Tiswas flan is not decorative. Two hours of live bucket-hurling out of Birmingham made the BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop^[13] (1976–1982) look like a floor polished for inspection, and the resulting custard is arguably the defining texture of the whole tradition. British children’s television tolerated mess, failure, embarrassment, and mild menace to a degree that still reads as reckless. Grange Hill (1978–2008) handled racism, shoplifting, and drugs. The Changes (1975–1975) opened with a father destroying the family television in a technophobic rage. Children of the Stones (1977–1977) assumed that terror is educational if administered intelligently. Newsround (1972—) broke the Challenger disaster.

The list is not at all jingoistic. Australia’s Bluey (2018—) sits cheerfully at five, Switzerland’s Pingu (1990–2000) at eight, and America’s SpongeBob SquarePants (1999—) and Sesame Street (1969—) come in at twenty-two and at twenty-three, respectively. But the foreign entries mostly sharpen the contrast. Sesame Street arrives with a civic ideal, explicit educational goals, and that mysterious American letter “zee.”^[14] Britain, meanwhile, produced The Wombles (1973–1975), whose entire premise is that ecological public-spiritedness lives in a burrow under Wimbledon Common and tidies up after you.^[15]

Then there is The Magic Roundabout (1965–1977), which is British television’s most elegant argument that dubbing need not involve translation. The series began life in France as Le Manège enchanté (1964–1974). Eric Thompson, charged by the BBC to adapt the French program for the British market, was given the video but for some reason it arrived without a soundtrack or script. Undaunted, he watched the silent images and wrote new English stories around whatever the puppets appeared to be doing. Sweet describes him as inventing “his own gags, stories and characters; his own magic.” According to The Observer, adults became so attached to the show’s five-minute pre-news slot that moving it to an earlier hour produced complaints from viewers who could not get home from work in time to watch it. The Guardian called Roundabout an “accidental triumph of homegrown English Surrealism.” The academic term for what Thompson did is detournement,^[16] but I prefer “gag dub.”^[17] In any event, the technique arrived on both sides of the Atlantic at almost the same moment. While Thompson was getting silly with puppets, over in America, Woody Allen re-cut and redubbed a Japanese spy thriller into What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966),^[18] turning an espionage plot into a hunt for a secret egg-salad recipe.^[19]

As regular viewers have come to expect, all 50 programs on Sweet’s best of British children’s television list follow below, with hyperlinks so you can look them up in the Emmy Award-winning EIDR Content ID registry. There you will find descriptive metadata for each work and third-party identifiers linking out to sources for cast, crew, synopses, and (for programs that survived the BBC’s tape-reuse policy) somewhere to actually watch them.

The 52^[20] Best British^[21] Children’s Television Programs

^[1] I blame the French for the two extra letters in the British word “programme”. Originally, program was “program” on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, in the Victorian era, someone thought it would be fun to adopt the French spelling “programme,” while America knew better and stuck with “program”. The French were also responsible for the abomination that is “theatre”. Again, it began as “theater,” but then Samuel Johnson Frenchified the English language and adopted the “re” ending in his famed 1755 dictionary. Noah Webster set things back on the right path when he adopted simplified spellings in his American English dictionaries, starting in 1806. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed when “computer” came along, or we’d be dealing with “computre" instead.

^[2] In one episode, a television set crash-lands on their planet from Earth. The Clangers destroy it, fearful of its influence. Oliver Postgate was not a subtle man about this sort of thing, and he was also not wrong.

^[3] Captain Flack’s roll call (Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb) was recited in all but one episode. Gordon Murray was firm on the point that “Pugh and Pugh are twins you must understand,” not Hugh and Pugh. They never fought an actual fire in Trumpton because fire, smoke, and water are extremely difficult to animate in stop motion, which made Britain’s best-loved fire brigade, functionally, a brass band that owned a ladder.

^[4] If you want to check this yourself, good luck: the BBC wiped eight of Bod’s (1975–1976) thirteen episodes in the interests of saving money by re-using video tapes. An entire philosophical tradition, taped over. (The original high-definition recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing were also taped over and re-used as a cost savings, so it’s not just the BBC that engaged in such shenanigans.) Somewhere in this there is a lesson about the value of a durable identifier attached to a durable copy.

^[5] Channel 4 arrived in November 1982. Before that, an entire nation shared three channels, which is fewer than the average American household currently devotes to competitive baking.

^[6]Smallfilms operated out of a disused cow shed on Peter Firmin’s farm in Kent. Three of the top four programs on the list came out of that shed, which should trouble anyone who has ever written a budget justification.

^[7] Not to be confused with Mr. Bean (1990–1995), also British, but there the similarity ends. Mr. Benn is gentle, polite, and diplomatic while Mr. Bean is selfish, childish, anarchic, and mischievous. Though, both do wear suits.

^[8] A costume store, for the rest of us.

^[9]As a royal cook, he restores a listless princess’s appetite by inviting her to share dinner with poor children. Diplomacy is arguably the most British superpower available, evidenced every time someone joins an orderly queue.

^[10] The BBC could not name brands on air, so Fablon (large, vinyl sheets in bright colors with a peel-and-stick adhesive backing popular for crafts projects) became “sticky-back plastic” and Sellotape (equivalent to Scotch Tape in the US) became “sticky tape.” Two generations of British adults now have no idea what these products are actually called.

^[11] And a major reason why we expect all ancient Romans to speak with British accents. See, for example, the hullabaloo that surrounded The Odyssey (2026) using actors with American accents to portray ancient Greeks.

^[12] “Today Is Saturday: Watch and Smile,” which nobody confirmed on the record until Chris Tarrant did so on Tiswas Reunited (2007), a reunion special. Delightfully, tiswas is also a genuine dialect word meaning a state of agitated confusion, which is either a very good joke or a very good accident.

^[13] Which did not make the list, perhaps because of its significant lack of projectile flan.

^[14] British children are issued the letter “zed” and are obliged to work out “zee” from context, largely by watching Sesame Street.

^[15] The Oxford English Dictionary carries “womble” as a noun, first recorded in 1968, derived from “Wombledon Common,” a child’s mispronunciation of Wimbledon. Oxford Languages also lists an informal verb, to womble: to wander about in a relaxed way. Very few children’s programs make it into the dictionary twice.

^[16] The Situationist International coined the term in 1959 to describe the reuse of existing artistic elements inside a new construction, where the borrowed element can lose its original sense and acquire a different one in the new ensemble.

^[17] And not just because it’s English rather than French, though that fact can’t be entirely discounted. (Did I mention that I did not do particularly well with French when I was in school?)

^[18] The Magic Roundabout came first, but there’s no reason to believe that Allen knew about it when he created What’s Up Tiger Lilly?. Instead, it appears to be a case of parallel evolution. However, lest there be a Leibniz/Newton debate over this issue, Roundabout clearly was created andpublished first.

^[19]The Magic Roundabout reached British screens in October 1965; What’s Up, Tiger Lily? arrived in 1966. Neither party needed to know about the other to find the same joke, which is that the soundtrack and the picture are under no obligation to agree about reality.

^[20] The list started with 50 entries, but #6 is actually 3 different series.

^[21] Programs that aired in the UK even if they were foreign imports, though most were local productions.