Beloved British children’s TV show The Wombles is being reclaimed for a third time, 50 years after the Wimbledon Common burrowers first appeared on screen.
The fuzzy, environmentally minded creatures, who lived by the motto ‘make good use of bad rubbish’, are being resurrected for a new TV series written by Will Davies, whose credits include How To Train Your Dragon and the Johnny English string of spy spoofs.
However, the cuddly creatures shot to international stardom in 1973 with a BBC series of stop-motion animated shorts, narrated by Bernard Cribbins.
The show came with an accompanying novelty band, led by musician Matt Batt, which performed the theme tune Remember You’re a Womble – and elevated the litter pickers to the status of timeless British icons.
Deadline reports the family subterranean fuzzy eco-warriors is due for a comeback under the guidance of screenwriter Davies and Altitude Television, which produced the 2022 spy thrillers series The Ipress File, based on the Len Deighton novel.
Altitude hasn’t specified how the show will be modernised, though the Wombles’ official Facebook page has featured clips of the creatures rendered in CGI for a number of years.
This is the third time that the Wimbledon residents have been the subject of a revival.
Wombles returned to British living rooms in the 1990s after three series worth of new episodes were produced by a Canadian TV company and screened on ITV, with Beresford and Batt returning to write the show and oversee its output.
Beresford died on Christmas Eve in 2010 at home on Alderney in the Channel Islands.
Five years later, Batt tried to reboot the show again with a cast including Cribbins and Ray Winstone.
But the musician’s attempts to get the CGI series off the ground ended in failure after he sold the rights to the show amid financial troubles, and he declared himself bankrupt in 2017.
Two episodes had been produced and screened at Cambridge Film Festival the year before but the programme was eventually cancelled.
Word of this third reboot first spread in 2020, when businessman Craig Treharne, who bought Batt’s share of the Wombles rights, sought to take the series in a new direction that some feared would be ‘woke’.
Elizabeth Beresford’s children, including son Marcus, lashed out at the plans. The family owns a 15 per cent stake in the Wombles brand.
This will be woked up to the max. Indoctrination for the new generation.
There was nothing wrong with the original Wombles, so why mess with it?
It shouldn’t be spoilt by becoming political either. It’s just a children’s programme and should remain the same.
I shudder to think how badly this is going to be destroyed with characters of more various types to embrace all this diversity rubbish.
Classics are best left alone and they should remain how they were because remakes ultimately turn out awful.
Perhaps they should just leave the Wombles in the past. I mean who would want to suddenly arrive in London in 2023?
Why is there even a need for a remake? Why not just show re-runs of the original series? The original Wombles was perfect just as it was! Otherwise, they’re going to take a brilliant show from yesteryear and turn it into woke trash. They should just leave it alone, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
All sing along now, ‘The Wokels Of Wimbledon, Entitled Are We’.
Can’t someone just come up with an original idea? No one has any imagination these days, but they’re happy to ruin an original idea.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 
If you like Len Deighton’s Mr Palmer, watch out for a real spy whom critics named a posh Harry Palmer. His MI6 codename was JJ and he was one of Pemberton’s People in MI6 in real life. Read #TheBurlingtonFiles a must read for espionage cognoscenti … https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php.
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