Man Who Worked in the Garden

The Man Who Worked in the Garden was a pivotal unseen character in the long-running BBC children’s television series, The Flower Pot Men, one of the programmes broadcast weekly from 1952 as part of the daily slot, Watch with Mother.

The Flower Pot Men

The invariable setting for The Flower Pot Men was the “beautiful garden” surrounding a large English house (though it was introduced as a “little house”). Whenever the “man who worked in the garden”, as he was always called, went “inside the house to have his dinner”, two puppets with strange elocution, made from flowerpots, came out to play. They were Bill and Ben, who lived in very large adjacent flowerpots bearing their respective names, between which grew a large plant, similar to a sunflower (helianthus annuus), called the “Little Weed”.

The ploy, whereby viewers were privy to apparently secret activities, was a familiar one. In Andy Pandy, another Watch with Mother series, a rag doll called Looby Loo came to life whenever Andy and his friend, Teddy, were out of the room.

Mores of the 1950s

The Man Who Worked in the Garden was an interesting reflection of his times and class. In particular, he ate dinner in the middle of the day, whereas those running the BBC at the time, whose attitudes and habits seemed to pervade the Corporation's programmes, would have taken lunch or luncheon. In fact, the reference to “dinner” helped to establish the man’s working class credentials; no doubt, in the evening he would have had “tea”, rather than the middle or upper class “dinner”.^[1]

Another point of note was that, during a period of relative austerity in the early to mid 1950s, the BBC chose to locate The Flower Pot Men in what was plainly a prosperous and leafy suburban or semi-rural area. In changing times since the Second World War, most “ordinary” people would neither have employed nor have been able to afford a gardener - if, indeed, they had a garden.

An alternative reading is that the female "Little Weed" significantly dominates the two rather childish Flowerpot Men.

Notes

1. ^ Nancy Mitford (ed. 1956) Noblesse Oblige