The Wombles

During a period of strong popularity across the United Kingdom, the Wombles emerged as fictional beings devoted to environmental cleanup. Equipped with their signature “tidy bags,” they roamed about collecting litter discarded by people and repurposing whatever they gathered. Children’s author Elisabeth Berseford introduced the characters in books written during the closing years of the 1960s; those volumes gained an international audience and appeared in multiple translations. By the following decade the furry figures, distinguished by pointed snouts, moved to the screen in a live-action children’s series rather than an animated production, at which point they also began performing music. Multi-instrumentalist and composer Mike Batt supplied the program’s songs and secured his initial eight chart successes through Womble-related recordings. British listeners encountered six full-length Wombles albums and more than twelve singles during the seventies, while an album plus several singles reached listeners in Canada and the United States. Subsequent anthologies have continued to appear, presenting collectors with an eclectic range of styles and memorable tracks such as “Remember You’re a Womble” and “Non Stop Wombling Summer Party.” Among the later releases are Columbia’s The Best Wombles Album So Far, Vol. 1 from 1998 and the two-disc set The Wombles Collection issued by Dramatico in 2000. The original television program returned briefly near the end of the nineties, when more than a dozen fresh episodes were broadcast.