Camberwick Green
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Camberwick Green (1966) is a British children's television series, originally seen on BBC ONE, featuring stop-motion puppets. It was written and produced by Gordon Murray and animated by Bob Bura and John Hardwick. Music was by Freddie Philips, and narration and song vocals were provided by Brian Cant. There are 13 fifteen-minute colour episodes.
Each episode begins with a shot of a musical box which rotates while playing a tune. The lid of the box then opens and one of the puppet characters emerges. After a brief introduction to the character, the background appears and the episode's story begins.
The series is set in the small, picturesque (and completely fictitious) village of Camberwick Green, which is inhabited by such interesting characters as Police Constable McGarry (Number 452), Mickey Murphy the Baker, Dr. Mopp who makes house calls in his vintage car, and the town gossip, Mrs. Honeyman, who is always seen carrying her baby. Just outside the village lives Johnathan Bell, owner of a modern mechanized farm, who has a friendly rivalry with Windy Miller, owner of a clanking old windmill and a firm believer in old-fashioned farming methods. Nearby is Pippin Fort, the military academy run by Captain Snort and Sgt Major Grout. Almost all of the characters have their own theme songs.
Each week the villagers undergo such domestic adventures as a shortage of flour, a swarm of bees, a water shortage, and rumours of an unwanted electrical sub-station being built in the village.
At the end of each episode the narrator bids farewell to the puppet character who was seen at the beginning, and the character disappears back into the musical box.
Camberwick Green is notable for having no overt fantasy content, apart from the musical box. For the most part it is simply about ordinary people doing ordinary things, and perhaps for that reason it has remained popular to this day.
Unfortunately the original masters seem to have been lost; most of the surviving episodes tend to suffer from scratched, wobbly or grainy picture quality.
The series spawned two sequels in a similar vein: Trumpton and Chigley.
External links
- The Trumptonshire Web (http://www.t-web.co.uk/trumpgo.htm)
- The Trumptonshire Trilogy (http://trumpton3.homestead.com)
- Trumpton3D (http://trumpton3d.com)