Flobbadob!

A Neurologist's Reflection on Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6zNwBTLSWU&t

I was three years old, sitting cross-legged on a threadbare carpet in London, my nose practically pressed against a ten-inch black-and-white television screen—that miraculous portal that flickered with all the gravitas of a campfire in the corner of our modest flat. The year was somewhere in the early 1950s, and I was about to meet two flowerpot men who would shape my understanding of language, absurdity, and ultimately, the medicine I would practice half a century later.

Still from original BBC series, with Little Weed

The Garden at the Bottom of Consciousness

 

Bill and Ben lived at the bottom of a garden. Not a grand garden, mind you—no Hampton Court topiary or Versailles formality—just an ordinary English garden with a slightly negligent gardener who had the good sense to leave regularly, allowing the magic to happen. When he departed, these two little chaps emerged from their flowerpots like thoughts rising from the unconscious, speaking in that glorious nonsense language they called "Oddle Poddle."

Flobbadob! It meant everything and nothing. Hello, goodbye, perhaps "I say, old chap, this is rather extraordinary, isn't it?" All compressed into three syllables of pure semantic rebellion. As a three-year-old, I found this deeply satisfying. As a seventy-five-year-old neurologist, I find it profoundly satisfying. Because Bill and Ben understood something that took me decades of medical practice to fully appreciate: sometimes the best communication transcends conventional language entirely.

 

String Puppets and the Theater of Pain

They were string puppets, these flowerpot philosophers, jerking about the garden with all the mechanical grace of a patient recovering from a stroke. Maria Bird voiced both of them, which means that Bill and Ben were essentially having conversations with themselves—a neat trick that every chronic pain patient knows intimately. The internal dialogue between the part that hurts and the part that observes the hurting, between hope and despair, between "I can manage this" and "I absolutely cannot manage this."

Weed, their companion, was a sunflower who spoke by having air blown through a reed. Think about that for a moment. A puppet plant whose voice was literally just wind through a tube, and yet we children understood perfectly what Weed was communicating. We didn't need a translation app or a medical interpreter. We just knew. This is precisely what I try to teach medical students about pain assessment: sometimes a wince communicates more than a ten-point numerical scale. Sometimes "flobbadob" contains more diagnostic information than a detailed pain history.

The Fifteen-Minute Consultation

Each episode lasted about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! In that time, Bill and Ben would have an adventure, solve a problem, probably misunderstand something, reconcile, and return to their pots before the gardener came back. Fifteen minutes of complete narrative arc, character development, conflict resolution, and moral instruction.

Now, I don't know if you've looked at the state of modern healthcare recently, but fifteen minutes is precisely what we get with most patients. Fifteen minutes to understand decades of accumulated suffering, to distinguish between nociceptive and neuropathic pain, to account for psychological overlay, to prescribe, to reassure, to heal. Bill and Ben managed entire existential adventures in that time. Perhaps we neurologists should take notes.

The secret, I think, was their economy of expression. When you can only say "flobbadob," "flobbalob," and "weeeeed," you become remarkably efficient. You get to the point. This is what I tell my chronic pain patients: Be a flowerpot man. Tell me the essential thing. Not the entire encyclopedia of your suffering, just the flobbadob of it.

 

The Gibberish Cure

Let me confess something that might get me drummed out of the American Academy of Neurology: sometimes, when I'm explaining complex pain pathways to patients—the difference between A-delta fibers and C fibers, the role of the dorsal horn, the descending inhibitory pathways—I see their eyes glaze over in exactly the way mine must have glazed over during undergraduate organic chemistry. And I think: What they're hearing is Oddle Poddle.

Not because they're unintelligent, but because pain is fundamentally ineffable. It resists precise language. McGill Pain Questionnaire be damned—when you're in the grip of it, it's all just "ow ow ow" in different registers. So sometimes I abandon the neuroscience lecture and I simply say: "It hurts like blazes, doesn't it?" And they nod vigorously, gratefully, because I've spoken their language. Flobbadob. Message received.

Bill and Ben taught me that humor doesn't trivialize suffering—it contextualizes it. Those two little men lived in a world where nothing was quite right (they were flowerpots, for heaven's sake, achieving consciousness and mobility for reasons never explained), yet they approached each day with curiosity and delight. Their adventures were humble: investigating a mysterious object (usually something mundane like a glove or a trowel), being startled by Weed, resolving some tiny conflict, and going home satisfied.

The Lost Episodes and Lost Patients

Here's a melancholy fact: many of the original episodes were lost. Wiped, taped over, or simply deteriorated beyond recognition. The BBC didn't think anyone would care about string puppets speaking gibberish decades later. They were wrong, of course. In 2019, the BBC Archives painstakingly restored some of these lost episodes, digitizing what remained of Bill and Ben's small adventures.

As someone who's practiced neurology and pain management for over fifty years, I think often about my "lost episodes"—the patients I couldn't help, the diagnoses I missed, the chronic pain cases that defeated me. You can't restore those. There's no archive that will bring back the patients who suffered needlessly because I didn't know what I didn't know. But what Bill and Ben taught me—on that scratchy black-and-white screen in 1952—was that you show up anyway. You emerge from your flowerpot. You say flobbadob with conviction. You have your small adventure. And then you go back to your pot and wait for tomorrow.

The Postwar Gentleness

Bill and Ben embodied what the history books call "the gentleness and optimism of postwar British culture." This always makes me laugh, because the Britain I remember from the early 1950s was still rationing butter and dealing with bombsite rubble. "Gentleness and optimism" is rather generous language for "we're all traumatized but trying to pretend we're not."

But perhaps that's precisely why Bill and Ben mattered. They offered fifteen minutes of gentle absurdity in a world that had recently been rather harshly sensible. They said: Look, none of this makes sense anyway. You might as well be a flowerpot man. At least you'll have adventures.

I think about this with my chronic pain patients, many of whom are living through their own postwar periods—post-surgery, post-accident, post-diagnosis. They're dealing with their own rubble. And sometimes what they need isn't another medication adjustment or nerve block. Sometimes they need permission to speak Oddle Poddle for a while. To be bewildered. To not have to make sense. To just say flobbadob and have someone understand.

The 2001 Revival and the Problem of Nostalgia

In 2001, the BBC revived Bill and Ben as a stop-motion animation for CBeebies. They added new characters—Thistle and Boo (names that sound like either garden companions or prescription medications, I'm never quite sure which). The animation was smooth, colorful, high-definition. Very professional.

 

And yet... something was lost. The jerky string puppets had a quality that the smooth stop-motion couldn't replicate. They looked like they might hurt—stiff, awkward, struggling against their strings. Which is, of course, what embodied existence feels like for most of us, particularly as we age, particularly when we're in pain. We're all string puppets giving it our best flobbadob.

The revival was nice. But it was too nice. The original Bill and Ben existed in that productive space between functioning and struggling, between control and chaos, between sense and nonsense. They were liminal creatures. The new ones just looked like they were having a nice time in a garden. Which is fine, but it's not the same as living at the bottom of a garden, waiting for the gardener to leave so you can finally be.

Medical Education and the Flute and Xylophone Method

The original show was accompanied by flute and xylophone music. Simple, repetitive, almost hypnotic. No grand orchestral sweeps, no emotional manipulation through strings and timpani. Just: flute, xylophone, message.

This is how I wish medical education worked. Instead of the grand orchestral complexity of cellular biology, pharmacodynamics, and evidence-based guidelines, sometimes I want to just play two notes and say: Pain bad. Less pain good. Here's how.

Obviously, this is insufficient for board certification. But it might be sufficient for compassion. Bill and Ben didn't have access to advanced therapeutics. They had each other, they had Weed, and they had their capacity for wonder. Yet they managed to turn simple garden encounters into meaningful experiences.

Some of my most successful therapeutic relationships have operated on the Bill and Ben model: we don't understand everything, we're working with limited resources, we're going to encounter confusing situations, but we'll face them together and we'll try to maintain some humor about it. Flobbadob, let's see what we can do.

 

The Cultural Icon Problem

The history tells us that "Bill and Ben became cultural icons of British children's television." This is both true and absurd. They were flowerpots. Speaking nonsense. For fifteen minutes at a time. Yet they entered popular speech, were referenced in British comedy, and became symbolic of "a simpler era."

There's a tendency in medicine to romanticize "simpler" approaches to care—the country doctor with his black bag, making house calls, knowing everyone in the village. We forget that "simpler" often meant "people died of treatable conditions." But there was something in that model worth preserving: the sense that the healer and the patient were in the same garden together, speaking a common language, even if that language was occasionally gibberish.

Bill and Ben became icons not because they were sophisticated or grand, but because they were recognizable. Every child understood what it was like to be small in a big world, to not quite grasp what was happening, to need a friend, to speak in a private language. That's universal. That's why they endured.

In pain medicine, our icons are different—Melzack and Wall's gate control theory, the WHO pain ladder, the biopsychosocial model. These are important. But sometimes I think we could use a few more flowerpot men in our iconography. Figures who remind us that being bewildered is normal, that not having all the answers is the human condition, that flobbadob is a perfectly reasonable response to suffering.

The Weed Principle

Let's talk about Weed. Weed was a sunflower who couldn't speak English, only communicate through that reed-blown wheeze. Weed was neither Bill nor Ben—Weed was the garden itself, somehow sentient, somehow involved, but definitively other.

In every clinical encounter, there's a Weed. It's the chronic pain itself—this third presence in the room that neither patient nor physician fully controls or understands, but which definitely has opinions and makes itself heard. You can't have a conversation about pain without pain being part of the conversation. It wheezes and interrupts and sometimes helps and sometimes hinders.

 

Bill and Ben never tried to eliminate Weed. They didn't uproot the sunflower or spray it with herbicide (although, let's be honest, their botanical gardening practices were questionable at best). They simply accommodated Weed. They worked around it. They included it in their adventures. Weed was part of the ecosystem.

This is closer to good pain management than our war metaphors—"fighting pain," "battling chronic conditions," "defeating symptoms." Sometimes you just need to say, "Right, there's Weed. Weed's here. Let's have our adventure anyway." Flobbadob, Weed. We see you.

The Ten-Inch Screen and the Vast World

That television was ten inches diagonal. Black and white. The reception was probably terrible. And yet through that tiny, flickering portal, I encountered a universe. Bill and Ben's garden was small—smaller, probably, than our actual garden—but it was limitless in possibility.

This is the paradox I've observed in chronic pain patients: their world often shrinks to the dimensions of their suffering—this joint, this nerve, this daily routine. Yet within that tiny space, there can be immense complexity, tragedy, heroism, humor, despair, and hope. A fifteen-minute consultation is a ten-inch screen. But if we're paying attention, if we speak each other's language, if we're willing to encounter some nonsense along the way, it can contain multitudes.

The Real Flowerpots

Here's a detail that delights me: the original puppets were made from real flowerpots. Not fancy theatrical materials designed to look like flowerpots. Just actual terracotta pots from a garden center, probably costing a few shillings, with faces painted on and some cloth for little bodies.

There's something profound here about working with what you have, about finding the sacred in the ordinary, about transformation that doesn't require transcendence—just imagination and commitment. The flowerpots didn't become Bill and Ben. They always were Bill and Ben. They just needed someone to see it and give them voice.

My patients aren't broken people who need to be fixed. They're people—complete, complex, inherently valuable—who happen to be experiencing pain. The therapeutic task isn't to transform them into something other than what they are. It's to help them see that even in their flowerpot existence, even in their limited garden, even speaking Oddle Poddle, they have adventures available to them. They have agency. They have story.

Conclusion: A Lifetime Later

When I think about what has most informed my practice—what has helped me sit with suffering, maintain hope, and occasionally achieve healing—I keep coming back to two flowerpot men on a ten-inch black-and-white screen, speaking a language that made no sense and perfect sense simultaneously.

Flobbadob, indeed.

If I could rewrite the medical school curriculum, I'd include a module on Bill and Ben. Not as nostalgia or comic relief, but as serious clinical instruction:

·      Sometimes the best communication transcends conventional language

·      Economy of expression is a clinical virtue

·      Humor doesn't minimize suffering—it makes suffering bearable

·      Gentleness in the face of chaos is revolutionary

·      Working with limited resources requires creativity, not despair

·      The bewildered can still have adventures

·      Not everything needs to make sense to be meaningful

·      Accommodation beats elimination

·      Small screens can contain vast worlds

·      Real flowerpots are sufficient

 

When I'm with a patient who's been through the medical mill—seen twelve specialists, tried forty medications, undergone procedures that promised everything and delivered nothing, who sits in my office radiating exhaustion and fading hope—I sometimes think: We're both flowerpot men here. We're speaking Oddle Poddle. But we're speaking it together.

And occasionally, just occasionally, that's enough. The gardener leaves. We emerge from our pots. We have a small adventure. We return, somehow slightly changed. We wait for tomorrow.

 

Flobbadob, my friends. Flobbadob.

 

When I lecture to medical students about pain management, I usually end with this: You're going to encounter suffering that doesn't respond to your interventions. You're going to face patients whose pain is immune to your best pharmacology, your most skilled procedures, your most compassionate presence. You will feel helpless. You will doubt your competence. You will wonder if you're doing any good at all.

In those moments, remember that showing up is itself therapeutic. Witnessing is itself healing. Speaking the patient's language—even if that language is "it hurts" in fifty different ways—is itself medicine.

Be a flowerpot man. Live at the bottom of the garden. Wait for the gardener to leave. Emerge. Have your small adventure. Speak your gibberish with conviction. Include Weed. And then go back to your pot, knowing you've done what flowerpot men do.

It won't feel like enough. But Bill and Ben taught me: enough is not the point. Showing up is the point.

And maybe, just maybe, flobbadob is the prayer we've been looking for all along.

https://x.com/Radiojottings/status/1604503000776572932?cxt=HHwWiICwpc2-q8QsAAAA

Addendum

Etrog Men

 

This year on Succot I placed two etrog survivors in my silver case with googly eyes.

Bill and Ben the Etrog men filled me with nostalgia for flobbadob

 

— Dr. Julian Ungar-Sargon, MD, PhD

November 2025