Camberwick Green

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Windy Miller

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, John Hardwick and Pasquale Ferrari. Music was by Freddie Phillips, and narration and song vocals were provided by Brian Cant. There are 13 fifteen-minute colour episodes produced by Gordon Murray Pictures and FilmFair.

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 Jonathan Bell, owner of a 'modern mechanical farm', who has a friendly rivalry with Windy Miller, owner of a clanking old windmill and a firm believer in old-fashioned farming methods. Mr. Dagenham, a travelling salesman who drives an open-topped convertible occasionally appears, as do the staff and cadets of Pippin Fort, a nearby military academy run by Captain Snort and Sgt. Major Grout. Almost all the characters have their own theme songs. There is one other character who never appears in the stories: an unnamed clown who turns a roller caption to display the show's opening and closing credits.

Each week the villagers undergo such domestic crises 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 latter 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 and a muffled soundtrack. Camberwick Green is available on DVD along with Trumpton and Chigley.

The series spawned two sequels in a similar vein: Trumpton and Chigley.

[edit] Modern Use

The character Windy Miller and his famous windmill appeared in September 2005 along with some other Camberwick Green characters in commercials for Quaker Oats on UK television. The puppets and setting are all re-creations because Murray destroyed the originals in the 1970s. Original narrator Brian Cant auditioned to do the voiceover for the commercials, before the job was instead given to Charlie Higson.

Episode five of the second series of BBC's Life on Mars features a recreation of the opening of Camberwick Green, with a puppet of the show's main character Sam Tyler (John Simm) who is suffering from an accidental drugs-trip emerging from the musical box and despairing over his colleague, Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister), who can be seen in puppet form 'kicking in a nonce' at the end. This later leads to Sam Tyler, still under the influence, threatening Gene Hunt and telling him to "Stay out of Camberwick Green!".