Rag, Tag and Bobtail
Encyclopedia
Rag, Tag and Bobtail was a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 children's television programme that ran from 1953 to 1965 as the Thursday programme in the weekly cycle of Watch with Mother
Watch with Mother
Watch With Mother was a cycle of children's programmes broadcast from 1952 by BBC Television which was created by Freda Lingstrom.It was the first BBC television programme specifically aimed at pre-school children, like its radio equivalent Listen with Mother that also started in 1950...

.
  • Produced by: Freda Lingstrom
    Freda Lingstrom
    Freda Violet Lingstrom OBE was a BBC Television producer and executive who was responsible for pioneering children's programmes in the early 1950s....

     and David Boisseau
  • Stories: Louise Cochrane
  • Narrated by: Charles E. Stidwell, David Enders and James Urquhart
  • Glove puppeteers: Sam Williams and Elizabeth Williams.


There were three main characters: Rag, a hedgehog; Tag, a mouse; and Bobtail, a rabbit. Occasionally five baby rabbits appeared. The stories were simple and there were no catch-phrases like the other programmes in the cycle, but the series is still remembered with affection. Twenty-four episodes were made, plus two others that were untransmitted. Each episode was shot as a single 13-minute take.

In the dictionary, the term "rag-tag and bobtail" is a disparaging remark to describe people as just common country folk, riff-raff. An 1811 dictionary has it as tag-rag and bobtail.

In 1987, a Watch with Mother video was released by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

. The episode of Rag, Tag and Bobtail featured a scene where Bobtail discovered that the baby rabbits had been playing with mud-pies and they had turned black. He was unable to clean them, but in the end the mud was washed off.

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