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T H E M A K I NG
OF T H E
C H I L DR E N ’S
T V C L A SSIC
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W
WORZEL
GUMMIDGE
T H E
B OOK
STUART MANNING
1
Hazel Peiser’s original design
sketches for Aunt Sally
3. AUNT SALLY
Worzel is pleased to learn that an Aunt Sally is to be exhibited at the village
fete and decides she will make an ideal bride for him. Stealing Mr Peters’
suit so that he can attend incognito, Worzel finds Aunt Sally resistant to his
charms and preoccupied with worries about being sold abroad. Persuading
a lovelorn Worzel to take her place, the scarecrow finds himself in the firing
line on the coconut shy, while Aunt Sally falls foul of P.C. Parsons and the law.
BROADCAST
11 March 1979, 5.30pm
GUEST CAST
Laura Graham
(Miss Lewisham)
QUOTE
UNQUOTE
‘I ’ave made
appearances at the
best fairgrounds in
England. I’ve ’ad my
’ead knocked off by
a prince of the blood.’
Production Notes
The show’s third episode saw Una Stubbs making her debut as Aunt
Sally, described in Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s scripts as having
creaking limbs, with a voice like the call of a corncrake. Designer Hazel
Peiser chose to ignore the actual appearance of Aunt Sally fairground
GOOFS
Jon Pertwee’s teeth
exhibits when coming up with a look for the character.
are white during the
‘At the very first meeting, we talked about Aunt Sally,’ Peiser recalls.
opening scene in
I knew that she was this flat board thing in a fairground and said,
Ten-Acre field. The
red paint splodges on
“You can’t have that, because it’s not something that you can animate
Worzel’s face change
nicely.” I went home and thought about it and said, “Take this and show
between scenes. Look
out for Jon Pertwee’s
it to Jon.” I had a Pollock’s toy theatre peg dolly, because I liked those
gold chain again
figures. I said, “That’s it, that’s Aunt Sally.”
during the scene at
the police station.
With a concept decided, the costume came together quickly:
‘I didn’t know how well Una moved at the time, but
I thought you’d want to see her stiff little feet moving.
The minute I knew that it was a peg doll, I thought,
well she’s got to be a peg doll with airs and graces. So
the frock had to have bits of lace and flowers attached
to it, so that Una would have things to fiddle and to
play with as an actress.’
Ken Lailey built a full-sized Aunt Sally dummy for
filming, using the peg doll as reference. ‘Una was very
shocked when she saw that,’ laughs Peiser. ‘She said,
“She’s not pretty,” and I said, “Maybe not, but you
are.” I wanted the terrible old doll to be what Aunt
Sally really looked like. But she had to think she was
pretty – that was the whole thing.’
Una Stubbs credits the show’s director for helping
to establish Aunt Sally’s character:
‘I couldn’t believe how nasty James pushed me to
be,’ she recalls. ‘It felt like I was being grotesquely
unpleasant at first, but I realise that I could have
gone even further. Luckily, being a dancer, I found
The original design for the Aunt Sally mannequin
the movement quite easy,’
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THE WORZEL BOOK
SOUTHERN BOUND
59
3
Worzel and Aunt Sally’s
will-they won’t-they saga
caught the imagination
of viewers young and old:
‘I still remember the
Valentine’s Day messages
in the newspapers,’ says
Una Stubbs. ‘Every
year on the fourteenth,
there’d be pages and
pages of “Come and be
my Aunt Sally, your everloving Worzel” It was a
little disgusting, but also
very nice in a way!’
Looking back, Stubbs dismisses
the idea that Aunt Sally’s bullying ways
might have been a bad influence on a
young audience: ‘Children are brighter
than we think,’ she says. ‘As Aunt Sally,
I exposed myself as a nasty little piece of
work, who’d often get her comeuppance,
with a two-year-old’s tantrum. Children
know that’s not a good way to behave.’
Also joining the cast was Joan
Sims, making her first appearance as
Scatterbrook socialite Mrs BloomsburyBarton. Sims had enjoyed a long
association with the Carry On films,
usually paired alongside Sid James playing
long-suffering spouses. She had carved
out a steady career as a dependable comic
character actress, appearing regularly on
Sykes and Till Death Us Do Part, alongside
Una Stubbs. However, Sims’ personal life
was often marked by unhappiness, which
had undoubtedly impacted on her career,
leaving her grateful for the offer of the
role on Worzel Gummidge.
‘Joan was always terrific,’ says
associate producer David Pick fondly.
‘Her performance and her comic timing were instinct and experience all
together. I think she’d gone through some fairly hard times in her career –
it had plateaued. I suspect that Worzel probably brought a tonic to her.’
The fairground scenes were filmed over two days in Braishfield, with
the local community called upon to provide their services. The Women’s
Institute provided the cake stall, with the Braishfield Village Association
handling the flower show and marquees and children from a nearby
school making up the crowds.
For the crowd sequences, Jon Pertwee invited his nearest and dearest
on set to join the ranks: ‘I was involved in the odd fete scene,’ remembers
Pertwee’s daughter Dariel. ‘Included were friends of the family and Digby,
our King Charles cavalier spaniel, as well as James Hill’s two sex-crazed
shih tzus. I also helped out now and again doing a bit of traffic-stopping
and fetching and carrying stuff – all good fun.’
From this episode onwards, the teething troubles of the earlier
instalments were finally overcome, with Jon Pertwee’s costume, make-up
and performance all gelling into the recognisable Worzel persona that
would remain for the rest of the series. With Aunt Sally now in place,
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THE WORZEL BOOK
the show gained a new focus, tempering the laughs with a rich vein of
pathos as Worzel faced rejection upon rejection from her. The Worzel
Gummidge of the books was usually thoroughly indifferent to romance
of any sort, despite finding a wife; his television counterpart, however,
would now be characterised by an underlying loneliness and yearning.
‘The basic story is so funny and so sad,’ said James Hill, reflecting on
Worzel’s doomed infatuation. ‘It can be watched on many levels and has
great depth. It’s the most hopeless love affair. There’s truth in the writing.’
Locations
The police station scenes were filmed at the King’s Somborne Working
Men’s Club, located at the Cross, off of Winchester Road.
Trivia
Aunt Sally first appears in Barbara Euphan Todd’s book Worzel Gummidge,
where she is depicted as Worzel’s overbearing relative: ‘How I hates her,’
he grumbles. She is described as: ‘a very tall wooden lady, who stood
on three legs… She had a hard, bright face, and her nose stuck out
sharply. There was something very frightening about Aunt Sally.’
The wooden doll of Todd’s novel also bore little resemblance to real
Aunt Sally fairground attractions. Devised in the 1800s, the game
involved a wooden skittle painted to resemble an old lady, which players
would throw sticks at; the aim was to break a clay pipe placed in Aunt
Sally’s mouth. Surviving examples of the game often show a caricatured
black woman, reflecting the prejudices of the time. Today it is still played,
though now with a more nondescript skittle.
Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton, another Todd
character, made her first appearance in this
episode. Waterhouse and Hall exaggerated
her pretensions considerably, turning her into
a freeloading snob living in a stately home,
rather than the more benign town busybody
of the books.
Of all the episodes of the series, Aunt Sally
draws most directly from the original Todd
novel, which includes the sequences of Worzel
asking Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton to take his
place as a scarecrow and taking her hat, along
with him later wearing Aunt Sally’s dress and
bonnet under duress.
Aunt Sally is seen worrying about being sold
and sent to ‘Americky’, a term that Worzel
first coined in Todd’s novel Worzel Gummidge
and Saucy Nancy. Mr Shepherd is said to have
Life’s a drag: Worzel
reluctantly takes
Aunt Sally’s place
SOUTHERN BOUND
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5
Right: The Crowman.
‘The scripts were
always very me – very
Geoffrey,’ says Bayldon
approvingly. ‘The lines
were never a hindrance,
instead just lending
atmosphere like mad.’
owned Aunt Sally for a number of years, his grandfather having obtained
her from a travelling showman camping in his field. The Crowman taught
Aunt Sally to talk after Mr Shepherd suggested making her into a
scarecrow. She claims to have lived with Romanys in the past.
In the barn, Worzel is seen looking through a number of heads, including
Romany, riddle-me-ree, adding-up and reading heads. He and other
scarecrows refer to the English language as Yakkity: ‘On account of, that’s
how they talk, see?’ Compared to later episodes, Worzel is surprisingly
wily when persuading P.C. Parsons to release Aunt Sally from custody.
In Print
This episode was novelised in The Television Adventures of Worzel Gummidge,
re-titled Worzel and Aunt Sally. Based on the draft scripts, it again includes
a number of differences, including a different opening, in which John
and Sue are putting up posters for the fete and decide to pin one on an
inanimate Worzel to rouse him into life. Aunt Sally’s introduction is also
different; when Worzel finds her, she isn’t upside down and the sequence
with the fire-eater doesn’t appear. Aunt Sally was also included in the
Purnell Worzel Gummidge storybook.
4. THE CROWMAN
BROADCAST
18 March 1979, 5.30pm
GUEST CAST
Sarah Thomas
(Enid), Hazel Marks
(Scarecrow, uncredited)
QUOTE
UNQUOTE
‘The countryside is
chock-a-block with
stories. No, my young
friends, if scarecrows
walk and talk, they do
it only by themselves,
by the light of the
moon, when all the
world’s asleep.’
Worzel finds himself lovelorn and appeals to his maker the Crowman to help
him find a wife. Learning that the Crowman has been commissioned to create
a decorative scarecrow for Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton’s front lawn, Worzel begs
for the loan of its handsome head, but doesn’t receive the warm welcome he
expects his new look to bring.
Production Notes
Geoffrey Bayldon, seen briefly in the show’s opening episode, makes his
first proper appearance as Worzel’s creator, the mysterious Crowman.
Bayldon had remained a familiar ITV star, thanks to repeats of Catweazle,
and was keen to make his new character distinct and different. ‘I thought,
it mustn’t be anything like Catweazle,’ he remembers. ‘What I did was
something quite physical. Each time they said “action”, I put my bottom
jaw in front of the top one, so that I had a permanent jowl.’
Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall seem to have conceived the Crowman
drawing on romanticised clichés of tinkers, describing the character in
stage directions as a ‘travelling craftsman’, tying in with their original ideas
for a Romany-influenced scarecrow language. For the character’s costume
design, Hazel Peiser took a different approach. ‘He had to be a cross
between a priest, an undertaker and a god,’ she explains. ‘We wanted him
to be a dark silhouette.’
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THE WORZEL BOOK
SOUTHERN BOUND
63
7
Fitting attire:
A snapshot from
Geoffrey Bayldon’s
first costume tests
Many remember Bayldon as a genial presence on the set: ‘We were
gossip corner,’ laughs Una Stubbs. ‘Geoffrey children’s series Catweazle
had been such a success, so he was very assured when we started.’
‘Apparently I was a bit intimidated by Geoffrey when he was playing
the Crowman,’ says Jeremy Austin today. ‘I don’t remember it, but
apparently I used to hide behind the settee when watching him.’
The Crowman would often be seen riding his tricycle, accompanied
by his dog Ratter. Bayldon remembers having trouble getting to grips
with the Crowman’s trike, resulting in an early mishap: ‘They said to me,
“Can you ride a bicycle?” which seemed idiotic, but it wasn’t, and so I drove
it straight into a ditch. All I could say was, “Is the dog alright?” Willis Hall
saw this and said, “Is that all you can do?”’
The rehearsal script for The Crowman included some extra dialogue in
the opening scene, in which Worzel complains to his robin for scratching
inside him: ‘A scarecrow can’t call his stummick his own!’ As scripted, the
Crowman’s tricycle had a cowbell, the sound of which scares Worzel away
from the beet field, and was described as laden with wicker baskets at the
front and back. The script also features the earlier Rheuminy version of
the scarecrow language, indicated throughout simply as ‘blur-de-blur’.
A brief sequence of this was included in the filmed scene of the Crowman
greeting Worzel in Ten-Acre Field.
Another script deletion saw the Crowman agreeing to let Worzel have the
handsome head to ‘settle down… instead of terrorising the district.’ Later,
the transformed Worzel admonished the giggling John and Sue: ‘Ain’t they
never seen an ’andsome ’ead before?’ Also dropped during script edits was a
brief tussle between Worzel and Esme the sheep while en route
to meet the Crowman, followed by a later attempt to make
peace with her following the Crowman’s heart-to-heart chat.
Worzel’s charm offensive also lost a scene helping an old lady,
who rewarded his assistance with a coin. This sequence was
actually filmed but later dropped during editing. ‘That’s the
first wages I’ve ever ’ad,’ declares Worzel visibly touched.
Worzel’s handsome head was patterned after film matinee
idol Don Ameche, picking up on his centre-parted slicked hair
and pencil moustache. For good measure, an oversized set of
bright white false teeth were added, which Jon Pertwee visibly
struggles to keep in his mouth while delivering the dialogue.
The unnamed lady scarecrow in this episode appears
to have been envisaged as Barbara Euphan Todd’s Earthy
Mangold, though the cackling witch-like portrayal is a far cry
from the doting mother hen of the books. Hazel Marks, the uncredited extra
who played the object of Worzel’s affections, suffered for her art to make
the character especially alarming: ‘She actually took her false teeth out for
the part, to make herself look even worse,’ recalls make-up artist Gaynor
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THE WORZEL BOOK
Stevens. ‘A bonus for us, because it looked like it was our make-up!’
Sarah Thomas, seen briefly as a waitress in A Home Fit For Scarecrows,
returned as Enid the maid, a character who would appear in several
subsequent episodes. Her other roles include stints on Within These Walls
and a long-running role in Last of the Summer Wine as Glenda,
the sheltered daughter of Thora Hird’s character.
Locations
Mrs Bloomsbury-Barton’s home is a private property
located at Exbury Gardens in Southampton, built by
the famed Rothschild family during the 1920s. It had
previously been used extensively as a location and
production base on Southern’s The Famous Five series.
The view of the house seen on Worzel Gummidge is
actually the back of the building, which was altered for
filming with a set of false front doors. Worzel is later
seen helping a pensioner outside a house found on
Winchester Road in King’s Somborne.
Trivia
In Barbara Euphan Todd’s books, Worzel was made by an
old man called Mr Dyke, a rather enigmatic personality
who worked as a hedger and ditcher. The Crowman name
checks some of his other scarecrows, including Earthy
Mangold and Hannah Harrow from the original novels,
along with Scarer Tater and Soggy Boggart, an oftmentioned scarecrow who would finally make an appearance during the
show’s second series. The scene where the Crowman speaks to the children
was inspired by a similar passage in the original Worzel Gummidge novel.
Worzel accuses the lady scarecrow of being ‘a stuck-up ha’porth,’
which would become another oft-used catchphrase for the character.
The expression, which originates from the north of England, is actually
a derivation of a ‘halfpenny’s worth,’ denoting someone of no value.
The opening scene features an alarming sequence where Worzel raises a
hand to the female scarecrow for refusing to answer him, an instance of
overt violence that would probably be unacceptable for broadcast today.
Interestingly Megs Jenkins plays Mrs Braithwaite in a less friendly
way here than in other episodes, with her slightly sour disposition
feeling much closer to the character seen in the original books.
Manic makeover:
Worzel’s notat-all sinister
handsome head
In Print
This episode was novelised in The Television Adventures of Worzel
Gummidge, re-titled Worzel and the Crowman. It was also included
in the Purnell Worzel Gummidge storybook.
SOUTHERN BOUND
65
9
A V A I L A B L E
J U L Y
2 0 1 6
T H E
B OOK
When a former Time Lord swapped time and space for the mystery
of the countryside, one of children’s television’s most unusual
personalities was born. Jon Pertwee’s portrayal of the anarchic
scarecrow Worzel Gummidge won him a new generation of
viewers and would become his most enduring character.
The Worzel Book traces the journey of Scatterbrook’s scarecrow,
from the days of early radio and the novels of Barbara Euphan Todd,
through to the hit ITV television series and its eventual resurrection
in New Zealand for Worzel Gummidge Down Under.
This is the untold behind-the-scenes story of a much-loved TV classic,
featuring dozens of new interviews with cast and crew, including
Una Stubbs, Geoffrey Bayldon, Jeremy Austin, Bernard Cribbins,
Barbara Windsor and Lorraine Chase, illustrated with more than 300
photographs in black and white and colour, many previously unseen,
and includes a foreword by Sherlock creator Mark Gatiss.
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10 T H E W O R Z E L B O O K
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