I was born in 1946 and my family got our first television for the Queen’s coronation in 1953. That coincided with the beginning of perhaps the first children’s television show, Watch With Mother. The reason it was called Watch With Mother was that the BBC wanted to flag to parents that children’s television wasn’t going to be a babysitting machine that you could just put your kids in front of.
I’m not sure how well that worked out, but Watch With Mother was fantastic. It was a different 15-minute show each day and all of them became legendary – on Mondays you had Picture Book, Tuesday was Andy Pandy, Wednesday was the Flower Pot Men, Thursday was Rag, Tag and Bobtail and Friday was The Woodentops. Every person from the 60s onwards would know all five of those programmes. They were so enormously influential.
They were created by Freda Lingstrom, the first head of children’s television, and Maria Bird. They went on to create all the great early children’s television programmes like Crackerjack!, The Sooty Show and the storytelling shows fronted by Johnny Morris. All the big stuff in children’s television right up to the 60s came out of the minds of these two very dignified women who lived together in Sussex until they died in their 90s.
My mum and dad never thought of TV as something vulgar or not to be encouraged. They were working-class kids from the East End who had gotten enough money for their little house and a telly and it opened new worlds for them. So, television for me has always been a very positive thing – a very welcoming thing to do with my home and watching with my parents.
When it came to my own kids, they got the viewing habit from me. I remember them being very excited by the Mouseketeers. But we just watched everything together and we always talked about it. We would be looking at how these shows were made, what the message was, as well as enjoying them.
When I then started working in children’s television myself, presenting a show called Play Away in the late 70s, the senior figures were all passionate about developing writers, so I was allowed to experiment in a way that I would never have been able to on adult television. By the time I went on to write Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, it was very influenced by this heritage of me watching the beginning of children’s television.
British children’s TV has its own slightly strange, zany style that has become so influential. Really, what’s the difference between Rag, Tag and Bobtail and The Mighty Boosh? Very little.
The Secret Life of the Thames With Tony Robinson is available on My5
