The Wombles

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The Wombles are fictional characters created by British author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. The characters later became nationally famous in the mid 1970s as a result of a popular BBC children's television show using stop motion animation. A number of spin-off novelty songs also became major hits in the British music charts.

Wombles are pointy-nosed furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. This "green" message was ahead of its time in the 1970s. Although Wombles live in every country in the world, the stories focus on the life of the Wimbledon Common burrow in London, England. Beresford reportedly invented the name "Womble" when one of her young children referred to Wimbledon Common as "Wombledon Common".

Due to the Wombles' association with the area, sporting teams representing Wimbledon are sometimes affectionately dubbed "the Wombles". For a brief period during the 1990s, Wimbledon F.C. used a Womble as a club mascot, and in 2006 the club's purported spiritual successor AFC Wimbledon launched its own Womble mascot. After a naming competition in which the final name was chosen by Elisabeth Beresford herself, the club announced that the new Womble would be known as "Haydon", after Haydons Road, the nearest railway station to the club's original home ground, Plough Lane.

Contents 1 Characters 2 Children's novels 3 Television and film 3.1 Series one (1973) 3.2 Series two (1975) 3.3 Specials 3.4 Series three (1998) 3.5 Series four (1999) 3.6 Series five (1999) 3.7 Series six (1999) 4 Music 5 Comic strips 6 Trivia 7 External links

[edit] Characters

All of the Wombles have geographical place names, taken from an old atlas; the main characters were:

• Great Uncle Bulgaria (the Wombles' leader)
• Tobermory (engineer and handyman)
• Orinoco (overweight shirker)
• Bungo (over-enthusiastic and bossy)
• Tomsk (athletic Womble)
• Wellington (scientifically inclined)
• Madame Cholet (a cook)
• Alderney (Madame Cholet's assistant)
• Shansi (often paired with Alderney, as Bungo was with Orinoco)
• Miss Adelaide (schoolmistress)
• Stepney (East Ender with dreadlocks)

In the first book, Bungo was the youngest and least experienced of the team, and the story is mostly viewed through his eyes. Afterwards Wellington (who was not introduced until the second book) took over the role of "new boy". Alderney and Adelaide appeared in the earlier books, but were not included in the original TV series of the 1970s. Alderney was re-introduced in the later TV shows of the 1990s (the Channel Island of Alderney was actually Elizabeth Beresford's home at the time), along with Stepney (who appeared in none of the earlier versions).

[edit] Children's novels

There were a total of five novels:

• The Wombles (1968)
• The Wandering Wombles (1970)
• The Wombles at Work (1973)
• The Wombles to the Rescue (1974)
• The Wombles Go Round the World (1976)

(The latter two books are less well known than the original three, perhaps because they appeared after the advent of successful TV series.) In The Wandering Wombles, the setting moved from Wimbledon Common to Hyde Park in central London. However The Wombles to the Rescue saw them return to Wimbledon Common. The books also contain several concepts which were dropped in the later TV version (see below). For example, we learn that below a certain age, all Wombles are nameless. Upon his coming of age, a Womble chooses his name from Great Uncle Bulgaria's atlas, after which he leaves Miss Adelaide's "Womblegarten" and enters the communal work of the burrow (which is mostly clearing up and recycling human refuse). The life expectancy of a womble is over 200 years, with some reaching 300, which would make them the longest-lived of all animal species.

Beresford also wrote a collection of short stories entitled The Invisible Womble and Other Stories (1973), in which the original Wimbledon Common setting was restored. Although based on episodes from the TV series, these stories occasionally refer to events in the novels.

In addition to these books, a great many annuals, picture-books and children's early readers have been published over the years, some of which were also written by Elisabeth Beresford.

[edit] Television and film

The Wombles was adapted as a British children's television programme, The Wombles, a series of five-minute stop-motion episodes produced by FilmFair for the BBC and voiced by Bernard Cribbins. The first series aired in 1973 and the second in 1975, sixty episodes in all. In 1977, a feature-length live-action movie Wombling Free appeared, starring David Tomlinson and Bonnie Langford.

The Wombles were re-invented from 1998 as a cartoon after FilmFair was acquired by the Canadian company Cinar Films in 1996, a number of new geographically-named Wombles were introduced.

The original television series remained popular with children in the eighties. However, the original "green" message backfired: newspapers reported at the time that children were deliberately throwing litter onto the real Wimbledon Common in the hope of seeing a Womble emerge to pick it up.

In the 2005 Neil Jordan film, Breakfast on Pluto, the protagonist happens across a Wombles-themed amusement park at Wimbledon Common, and is hired to work at the park as Madame Cholet.

[edit] Series one (1973)

1. Orinoco & The Big Black Umbrella
2. The Rocking Chair
3. A Sticky Ending (or A Sticky End)
4. Great Uncle Bulgaria's Keep Fit Lesson
5. A Safe Place
6. Peep-Peep-Peep
7. The Purple Paw Mystery
8. Bungo's Birthday Party
9. The Invisible Womble
10. Orinoco Sees The Light
11. The Conkering Hero
12. One Pair Of Feet
13. Tobermory On Television
14. Crossed Lines
15. Blow The Womble Down
16. Madame Cholet Returns
17. Weighing In Time
18. Musical Wombles
19. Wombles And Ladders
20. Orinoco And The Ghost
21. A Game Of Golf
22. North, South, East, West
23. The Picnic
24. Games In The Snow
25. The Snow Wombles
26. What's Cooking?
27. Spring Cleaning Time
28. Marrow Pie
29. The Cement Mixer
30. The Circus Comes To Wimbledon

[edit] Series two (1975)

1. Bungo Up A Tree
2. Time And Slow Motion
3. Tomsk In Trouble
4. The Largest Womble In The World
5. Running Out Of Steam
6. Orinoco's Midnight Feast
7. Speak Up
8. The Vanishing Pancake
9. Madame Cholet & the Blackberries
10. The Fruit Machine
11. Portrait Of Great Uncle Bulgaria
12. Very Behind The Times
13. Burrow Hot Line
14. Trunk Call
15. MacWomble The Terrible
16. A Single Piper
17. Porridge For Breakfast
18. Highland Games
19. Home Sickness
20. Goodbye MacWomble
21. Hiccups
22. Film Show
23. Pirate Gold
24. Warm & Cosy
25. Autumn Leaves
26. The Wombles Times
27. Operation W.R.A.P.
28. The Secret Snorer
29. Womble Fool's Day
30. Womble Summer Party

[edit] Specials

• World Womble Day (1990)
• The Wandering Wombles (1991)

[edit] Series three (1998)

1. The Ghost Of Wimbledon Common
2. Orinoco The Magnificent
3. Tomsk To The Rescue
4. Madame Cholet's Day Off
5. Beautiful Boating Weather
6. MacWomble Is Coming
7. Shansi's Surprise
8. Any Womble For Tennis?
9. Out Of This Earth
10. Camping And Cloudberries
11. Spring Into Action
12. Hola Obidos
13. Welcome Back Bungo

[edit] Series four (1999)

1. Car Trouble
2. Deep Space Wombles
3. Orinoco's Sick Day
4. Wild News Chase
5. Macwomble The Charming
6. Rainy Daze
7. Great Cake Mystery
8. Bigfoot Womble
9. Chaos On The Common
10. Weather Or Not
11. Trouble At The Thames
12. Great Womble Explorer
13. Womble Winterland

[edit] Series five (1999)

1. New Year! New You!
2. Alderney's Big Break
3. The Thingummawotsit
4. The Sleep Wombler
5. A Life In The Day Of Madame Cholet
6. Wom-TV
7. Star Struck
8. Practically Joking
9. Tomsk's Pen Pal
10. What's A Womble?
11. Queen For A Day
12. The Womble Races
13. The Womble Times

[edit] Series six (1999)

1. Fancy! Fancy Dress
2. Time Travelling Tomsk
3. Bungo Bingo
4. The Thames Burrow Adventure
5. The Wombles Of Our Discontent
6. Riddle Me This
7. Unlucky Me
8. Nanny Alexandria Comes To Stay
9. The Unwelcome Womble
10. Shansi's Spider
11. Anchors Aweigh
12. Womble Inventor Of The Year
13. A Visit To The Highland Burrow

[edit] Music

Main article: The Wombles (band)

Songwriter and producer Mike Batt wrote the series' theme tune, and later went on to perform and produce a number of highly successful novelty singles as The Wombles.

[edit] Comic strips

The Wombles starred in a number of British comics including Teddy Bear (1973), Jack and Jill (1973-81) and a number of holiday specials.

[edit] Trivia

In the episode of Bottom entitled S' Out, Richie and Eddie hunt for Wombles in Wimbledon Common using chocolate hobnobs (a type of biscuit) as bait.

The Wombles were criticised because children who went to Wimbledon common deliberately threw litter in the hope of seeing a womble.

[edit] External links

• The Official Wombles Website
• Tidy Bag - The Online Wombles Museum
• Womble Lovers
• The Womble Burrow
• British Film Institute Screen Online
• The Wombles (1973 series) at the Internet Movie Database