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 reboot of the show called Bill and Ben was produced in 2001. Production 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. The Flower Pot Men was the story of Bill and Ben, two little men made of flower pots who lived at the bottom of an English suburban garden. The characters were devised by Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird in the 1950s. The puppeteers were Audrey Atterbury and Molly Gibson. The voices and other noises were produced by Peter Hawkins, Gladys Whitred, and Julia Williams who was the voice of Little Weed. The narration in all of the 1950s original episodes was by Maria Bird. The plot changed little over the run and always took place in a garden, behind a potting shed. A third character, Little Weed, of indeterminate species resembling either a sunflower or a dandelion with a smiling face, was shown growing between two large flowerpots. The three were also sometimes visited by a tortoise called Slowcoach and, in one particular episode, the trio met 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?". The Flower Pot Men spoke their own, highly inflected version of English, called Oddle Poddle, invented by prolific voice artist Peter Hawkins (who later provided speech for Captain Pugwash and the Daleks in Doctor Who). "Ickle-kickle", for instance, was an icicle and Ben would say "Flobabdob!". At the end of each adventure, they would say bye-bye to