Underground, overground, wombling free, the Wombles of Wimbledon Common are 50…
This weekend marks a full half-century since the eco warriors first burst onto TV screens in February 1973.
And to mark the occasion the original 60 episodes are being digitally remastered into HD and released on the Wombles YouTube channel from Sunday.
The five-minute shows, made using stop-frame animation for the BBC, featured Great Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco, Madame Cholet, Wellington, Tomsk, Bungo and Tobermory, who were ahead of their time when it came to recycling.
Under the motto “make good use of bad rubbish” they picked up whatever humans had discarded on the Common and tried to turn it into something useful.
The idea for the Wombles was dreamed up by author Elisabeth Beresford while on a Boxing Day walk with her children, Kate and Marcus.
They lived down the road but young Kate kept mispronouncing the area as Wombledon, and that was enough to inspire Beresford into dreaming up the whole community, who lived in a burrow and never got involved in politics, religion, sex or violence. Heaven forbid.
Marcus Robertson says he can still remember the moment when the idea was born. “It was 1966, my grandparents were up from Essex and we went out for this walk. She’d written many children’s books and TV series and her publishers had said, ‘Come up with the answer to Paddington Bear!’
“When my sister said, ‘Isn’t it lovely to be on Wombledon Common?’, she said, ‘That’s it! The Wombles of Wimbledon’. Mum invented this burrow full of Wombles and based them on everyone who’d been at Christmas lunch that year.”
Great Uncle Bulgaria was based on his paternal grandfather while Madame Cholet was his maternal grandmother, who’d run a boarding house in Paris.
Tobermory was based on Marcus’s uncle, while Wellington was his real-life son – Marcus’s cousin.
His sister Kate was a “bit of a tomboy” so was the inspiration behind Bungo while Marcus was immortalised as Orinoco, the Womble who loved to eat and sleep.
“My mother wrote the books in the 1960s when I was 10 or 11. Orinoco was the fattest, laziest and greediest. Sadly! My wife Marianne still recognises some of those fine qualities.”
When a need for more female characters was noted, Alderney was added. She was based on Marianne, who comes from the Channel Island where the family would go on holiday.
“My wife’s far more like a Womble than the rest of us,” Marcus says. “She is green, grows her own veg, even had her own treehouse.”
He says the green message was accidental but has helped to give the characters modern-day relevance. “When mum wrote this, the reason they focused on clearing up was because we were on Wimbledon Common and there was rubbish.
“She didn’t do it with a massive green message in mind because that sort of thinking didn’t exist. She did it because she cared about her surroundings and hated that humans left so much mess. She was very ahead of her time.
“Everything they wear, everything they use in the burrow has been discarded by humans. She was also from the war generation and hated wasting anything.” The Wombles had stopped being shown by the time of his mother’s death in 2010.
In the 1980s the series had moved to ITV and became 10-minutes long and in the 90s more versions were made by a Canadian company who dispensed with Bernard Cribbins as narrator and used Canadian actors. “It was bit like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins,” Marcus says. “It didn’t fit.”
A planned CGI reboot, announced in 2013 and with Ray Winstone on board, hit the budget buffers.
Marcus now has high hopes for a planned TV comeback, which is in its early stages. “They could absolutely be brought back,” he says.
“The characters are so enduring because everything about them, their values and cleaning up after humans and being respectful, is so relevant today. There’s no reason whatsoever why we couldn’t do a Paddington-style movie or a new TV series.”
In the books there are burrows all over the world, which is something he thinks the new version will pick up on. “In the 70s they stayed in Wimbledon because, with stop-frame animation, it took weeks to make a five-minute film. I’m quite sure if new stuff is made, it will reflect Womble communities are everywhere.”
“But the important thing is to retain the true essence of the stories,” he says. “They were warm and cuddly and there was no hint of any ill will – Uncle Bulgaria would put Orinoco in his place, but it gently. In the same way that my grandfather did.”
So who would write the stories? “I think we’d have some input,” says Marcus, now 67. “But we’re not young people and we have to understand some things will be different. I’m very impressed with the people they’ve got on the team now.”
Great Uncle Bulgaria had lived so long he could remember Queen Victoria, while Marcus has his own memories of meeting the more recent Queen, who awarded his mother an MBE for services to children’s literature in 1998.
“I remember going to Buckingham Palace and the Queen didn’t need a briefing on who Mum was because she was holding a Womble toy. They had a very animated conversation and Mum said afterwards, ‘She knew’.”
The Wombles used to come on before the teatime news, at 5.40pm.
“I’m sure she’d have watched it,” he says. “As she obviously did Paddington, because they used the same slot. It was the natural thing in those days.”
Marcus believes King Charles is also a fan. As youngsters, they shared a mutual friend, who was the son of the Dean of Canterbury and who had stuck a Womble sticker in the window of the front door of the Deanery.
“It said, ‘Put a Womble to work’, and Prince Charles remarked on it when he came in for tea, saying he liked it or he had a Womble, something like that,” Marcus says. “I love that.”
Animated by Ivor Wood and Barry Leith, narrated by Cribbins and with a theme tune composed by Mike Batt, the series has been voted into the top 10 favourite BBC children’s shows.
He believes his mother would be thrilled to see her creation still going strong. “Mum would be very happy they still appeal to many people of different generations around the world,” Marcus says.
“The Wombles work is never finished and more relevant than ever.”
Check out the HD episodes on the YouTube channel @womblesofficial from Sunday February 5.
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