Andy Pandy’s Coming To Play!

This is to all intents and purposes a truncated version of a sample chapter on Andy Pandy that was originally written for a proposed history of the BBC’s Watch With Mother timeslot; this perhaps unsurprisingly did not end up going much further, but in a roundabout fashion it did eventually lead to The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, which not only incorporates an in-depth look at the story of Andy, Teddy and Looby Loo and their decade-straddling Watch With Mother contemporaries but also of every other associated genre and timeslot from, well, Pogle’s Wood and Pipkins to Pob’s Programme and Press Gang and beyond. You can find out how to get hold of The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here and you can also find a series of tie-in podcasts with a collection of guests talking about their own personal favourite children’s television programme here; please don’t tell Andy that none of them chose him, though. BBC Four recently repeated a handful of editions of Andy Pandy – two apiece from the black and white and colour iterations – to celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of that very first long lost live broadcast, and while they inevitably drew the usual tedious round of contrived innuendo and phatic derogatory sarcastic comparisons to the latest feted streaming series du jour, it was also pleasant in contrast to see so many appreciative comments on its simplistic charm and the joys of watching something where the pace is so languid, the pauses so lengthy and the setting so unashamedly – albeit admittedly probably unavoidably – a television studio that you can almost feel the breeze whistling in through the doors. Even so, you do have to wonder how anyone’s attention was ever held for more than about three seconds by that business with the hobby horse.

Andy Pandy was devised by Freda Lingstrom and Maria Bird, experienced children’s writers who were ideally suited to such a challenging and in many respects unprecedented project. Formerly an illustrator, fringe theatre performer and novelist, Lingstrom had joined the editorial team of Junior, a periodical containing “a collection of stories, articles and pictures for the junior members of the family”, in 1945. Bird was at that point a staff writer on Junior, and the two formed a close friendship and a strong creative rapport, informed in no small part by the fact that both had lost fiancées during the First World War. Their work on Junior brought them to the attention of numerous BBC Radio producers, and after undertaking freelance work, Lingstrom was appointed Assistant Head of Schools Broadcasting in 1949, with Bird joining her in the department as a scriptwriter and producer. Although Andy Pandy was to nominally be a BBC programme and indeed would be made in their studios – albeit not in one of the better equipped ones – an arrangement was made whereby the actual production duties would be handled by Westerham Arts, an independent company that Lingstrom and Bird had recently founded and which they had named after the Kent village in which they both lived.

Early discussions had ruled out the possibility of using a child actor on grounds of both practicality and expense, and so Andy Pandy was instead portrayed by a marionette. Apparently living on his own despite his tender age, Andy roamed around a garden set and a couple of indoor rooms – locations specifically chosen, as suggested by the initial guidelines, to be immediately familiar to the intended audience – while discovering the purpose of everyday objects and encouraging viewers to join in with his singing and dancing. Each edition was generally based around a single activity, such as playing with a hobby horse or tidying up the house, but there was never a structured storyline as such; Lingstrom in particular felt very strongly that having a proper defined narrative rather than a loose theme would place the programme outside the comprehension range of a significant percentage of the intended audience.

To accompany the launch of the series, Lingstrom contributed a feature to Radio Times, opening by discussing how children were now accepting television not as a futuristic innovation but as a matter of course, touching on the not inconsiderable task she had faced in devising the show (“But what to give them? To find the answer a small group of people began to pool and observe their knowledge of the very young. What amuses them, what do they like, what games do they play, what frightens them, how long can they enjoy one thing, what kind of stories do they like, how many suck their thumbs, when do they have their day sleep (or don’t they)?”), and introduced Andy Pandy, a “baby clown” who was “not so much a character performing in front of the children, so much as one of themselves, doing what they do, and seeing with their eyes”, who would begin each show absorbed in his own business before noticing and waving to the children watching, much as a real life child of that age would do on being introduced to another. In a measure of her legendary assertiveness, Lingstrom concluded the feature by inviting any mothers watching to contact her with their feedback about the show.

On Tuesday 11^th July 1950, Freda Lingstrom, Maria Bird, Audrey Atterbury, technical adviser Martin Grainger and singer Janet Ferber convened at a prefabricated tin shed masquerading as a studio on the outskirts of the BBC’s Lime Grove complex to perform the first ever edition of Andy Pandy. Radio Times had turned up to one of the rehearsals the previous week and their photographer captured the cramped chaos of the conditions that they were expected to make a successful live broadcast from; the single backdrop and minimal pieces of scenery were literally mounted on top of Bird’s piano, with Atterbury and Grainger standing above the ‘set’ and Ferber leaning awkwardly in around a gap at the side. Transmitted between 3.45pm and 4pm, this was followed by another performance of a different script in the same slot on Thursday 13^th, and by two more on Tuesday 18^th and Thursday 20^th. Always intended as a try-out for what was still very much something of an experimental venture, these four broadcasts were successful enough to warrant discussion of a regular run to commence later in the year, but also served to highlight just how inadequate the conditions that the production team were working under were; during one edition, a string snagged on scenery and threw proceedings into chaos, causing an already heavily stressed Atterbury to walk out of the live broadcast, leaving the others to improvise for the remainder of the timeslot as best they could.

Andy Pandy returned on Tuesday 19^th September 1950 in what would become its regular slot of 3.45pm, although by 7^th November Ferber had left and had been replaced as the regular singer by Gladys Whitred. After taking a break over Christmas, the show would continue to run throughout 1951, although there were some notable developments along the way. From 19^th April, an additional Thursday slot was introduced, initially to house repeat performances of earlier scripts although after a couple of weeks a forward-thinking experiment took place. The show on Tuesday 8^th May was recorded as a ‘Telefilm’ – a relatively new process that involved pointing a specially adapted camera at a high-definition monitor showing an image of a live broadcast – and rebroadcast on Thursday 17^th; this was an experiment that would be repeated several times over the coming months. Meanwhile Julia Williams, a much younger singer, stood in for a couple of months while Whitred was unavailable, and Atterbury was joined at the rostrum by Molly Gibson, a puppeteer on loan from the BBC Puppet Theatre.

The main reason for this expansion in the production team was, it seems, due to a problem that nobody had actually anticipated. In barely more than six months, Maria Bird found that she had pretty much exhausted every last shred of inspiration and originality for a lone puppet on a single background with scripts tailored to a very young audience, and this was backed up by some of the correspondence that Freda Lingstrom had received in response to the show. Everyone involved agreed that a second puppet was needed to open up more creative potential, and so it was that on 6^th March 1951, Teddy Bear – quickly shortened to just Teddy – made his first appearance in Andy Pandy. An endearingly motheaten-looking bear sporting an oversized polka-dot bow tie, Teddy was conceived from the outset as a comically over-enthusiastic figure prone to bumbling across the set and getting the games and songs wrong, which immediately created a stronger and more appealing dynamic for the viewers. The production team also took this opportunity to commission a new version of Andy Pandy himself, which benefitted the puppeteers by being more streamlined and controllable, and the viewers by being slightly more visually appealing, with a more jovial expression than the somewhat harshly-featured original. Later in the year they would also be joined by Looby Loo, a doll who would come to life whenever Andy and Teddy were not around, and sing a song with the viewers before returning to an inanimate state when the other two returned. From the outset, Freda Lingstrom had sought to make Andy Pandy as interactive with its audience as possible, and this was perhaps her most inspired innovation, and indeed one that would be emulated by many other shows that later followed in the timeslot.

Proving so popular that they were given their own special on Christmas Day 1951, Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Loo had quickly become arguably the most recognisable ‘faces’ of early television, and it was at this point, following a total of seventy sometimes technically fraught live broadcasts which had recycled the same set of scripts – albeit with some modifications along the way – several times, that Freda Lingstrom took a fairly bold decision. Aiming to establish Westerham Arts as a proper production company in its own right, she drew up a proposal to pre-film a number of episodes – many of them reworked remounts of previous live editions – on high quality film stock, which could then be repeated indefinitely. Although made in BBC studios – this time in the slightly more capacious and better equipped BBC Puppet Theatre – and billed as a ‘BBC Film’, this was to all intents and purposes the first entirely independent production ever seen on the BBC, and indeed on British television full stop. It was also around this time that the increasingly strident Lingstrom began to argue that the associated timeslot should have a new and better name of her own invention.

On Tuesday 6^th May 1952, the first of what would eventually total thirty two filmed episodes of Andy Pandy – including some that were remade for technical reasons or shot in two seasonal variants – made its first appearance on BBC Television in its new timeslot of 4pm. Older viewers also had a chance to see Andy and Teddy as well when they showed up as part of the bill for Vic Oliver Invites You To ‘This Is Show Business’, a Light Entertainment show broadcast at 9pm on Saturday 10^th May; Andy and Teddy would also later make an appearance in About The Home, a show presenting ‘practical help for the housewife’ and broadcast just before Watch With Mother on 8^th April 1954, in which they explained the importance of brushing your teeth. Although they were performed and filmed ‘as live’ with only occasional edits, usually to facilitate a move from one set to another, these new permanently recorded editions did still allow for significant technical improvement and a wider scope for the scripts. They also gained – at Lingstrom’s insistence – distinctive opening and closing titles, featuring the letters of the show’s title being revealed by turning blocks; previous editions had apparently featured a brief glimpse of a still caption card, and on the earliest ones no introductory caption at all.

More significantly, they reveal that even at this incipient stage, the content of this timeslot was very different indeed to the perception that would fuel literally thousands of vague and unspecific parodies involving tinkly music, patronising narration, unintentional innuendo and poor standards of puppets and indeed puppetry that would follow over the coming decades. The fluid nature of the performance and production, and the fact that the clank of activity elsewhere in the studio is clearly audible in the background throughout, gives the shows an ambience and intimacy that was largely lost when television became a more sophisticated medium, while Maria Bird’s narration not only wryly acknowledges the fact that these are adapted remakes of earlier episodes (“Do you remember his swing, children? Some of you have seen it before, haven’t you?”), but also reacts wittily to unplanned technical issues such as Teddy receiving an unscripted whack in the face from an item of scenery. The stories – if they could even really be called that – are simplistic, but there is never a shortage of activity or attempt at interaction, and the three puppets obtain their respective ‘character’ directly through the differing styles in which they were operated. It is true to say that the overall tone is still rather formal and well-spoken, and that the strings are indeed as glaringly visible as popular memory suggests – although how else anyone expected a marionette to be operated is unclear – but the fact remains that they are more enjoyable and relatable than any television programme from over half a century ago has any right to be.

By the late sixties, concerns were being expressed about the condition of the original black and white prints of Andy Pandy, which had existed for longer than and indeed been shown more than twice as often as any other Watch With Mother show. While this concern has been exaggerated in later years, and the original prints still look surprisingly crisp and clear for a show of their vintage, it is true that the excessive wear and tear was beginning to tell, and rather than drop the show from the schedules completely, the BBC commissioned Westerham Arts to make thirteen new episodes in colour. Now operating as a wholly independent company, Westerham Arts opted to film these new episodes at EMI’s Abbey Road studios rather than the BBC. Whether they were subsequently invited to remake any of their other shows is unclear, though the fact that The Woodentops and Flower Pot Men were considered prominent enough to have their own tie-in annuals as late as 1971 would suggest that this was at least under consideration.

Most of the original Andy Pandy team were reunited for the new episodes, although there were some changes; Gladys Whitred was replaced as singer by Valerie Cardnell, while Maria Bird stood down as narrator and was replaced by none other than Vera McKechnie, formerly presenter of Westerham Arts’ later Watch With Mother show Picture Book; Bird did, however, continue to provide piano accompaniment, joined on this occasion by clarinettist Thea King. With Molly Gibson having retired and Audrey Atterbury having given up puppetry to become a successful antiques dealer, the puppets were operated by Cecil and Marge Stavordale with the assistance of Christopher Leith, a young recruit from the Little Angel Puppet Theatre. In addition to this, there was one small but significant change to the cast. Never exactly the most neatly groomed of puppets to begin with, Teddy had become noticeably more matted and threadbare in the intervening years, to the extent that making a new puppet from scratch became the more cost-effective option. With his replacement sporting a smaller bow tie and slightly more endearing features, this had the unintended effect of making the episodes seem obviously ‘new’ even to those still watching in black and white.

As the colour remake of Andy Pandy – first seen from Monday 5^th January 1970 – used more or less the same sets, puppets and scripts as the black and white episodes, it managed to retain the feel of the original, though this also lent it a rather anachronistic feel that often seemed unsuited to the new world of colour broadcasting. Nonetheless, the new episodes would be shown well into the mid-seventies, even though they were already looking rather out of place next to the likes of The Herbs and Mary, Mungo And Midge on their original transmission – and once new series utilising new technology and new approaches to programme making began to arrive in the early seventies, Andy Pandy would become the only remaining link to the earliest days of Watch With Mother.

Buy A Book!

There’s lots more about Andy Pandy along with Flower Pot Men, Rag Tag And Bobtail, The Woodentops, Picture Book and tons of their other visibly-stringed contemporaries from Watch With Mother and beyond in The Golden Age Of Children’s TV, available in all good bookshops and from Waterstones here, Amazon here and directly from Black And White Publishing here.

You can find a look at the BBC’s surprisingly best-selling late eighties Watch With Mother video compilations in Well At Least It’s Free, a collection of columns and features. Well At Least It’s Free is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. You can always just pretend you bought one and that Looby Loo stole it when nobody was looking.

Further Listening

Admittedly Florence and company have very little in common with Andy Pandy outside of the BBC logo, but you can find me talking about The Magic Roundabout on The Golden Age Of Children’s TV here.