1974- "Wombling Merry Christmas"

.....For Americans now accustomed to Barney and Teletubbies, the Wombles are no longer so hard to explain. I hope.

.....Boxing Day, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the day after Christmas. It's probably most commonly acknowledged in England and countries now or once part of the British Empire such as Canada. The idea was that most people spent Christmas Day enjoying a feast with their families at home. The next day they would make packages out of representative samples of the feast and bring them to non-relatives in their lives who would have been working through the holiday. Today that's known as "foisting leftovers on the help", but many Brits now celebrate it as a legal holiday for its post-festivity wind-down value. One particular Boxing Day in the 1960's Elisabeth Beresford took her young children for a stroll on Wimbledon Common. It was there that she conceived the idea of an entire hidden species of sophisticated rodents that lived under the Common, the Wombles. She began making sketches of individual Wombles, each with their own personality, and eventually they took on a well-defined collective identity with their own culture, ethos and history. The hallmark of their society is that they see new uses for the trash lying around the Common. Not having the same preconceptions as humans, everything they see has a purpose which they live to find. While we might see an empty bottle or food wrapper as something that has fulfilled its purpose and discard it, the Wombles discover it in that state and assume that its purpose has yet to be determined. Once created, the ecological and economical life lessons implied by the Wombles' way of life were obvious.

.....The idea blossomed into a franchise starting with children's books in 1968 and eventually including a television series, a feature film, dolls, toys, a variety of licensed products and a series of albums that spawned an string of consecutive top forty hits. Rocker turned jingle writer Mike Batt was asked to write an instrumental theme that evoked the personality of the characters when the television series was in the planning stages. He suggested it would actually be easier to go one step further and make it a song with lyrics. That turned out to be a fateful decision that consumed the next two years of his life.

• 03:18 WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS (Mike Batt)
• -N/A- b/w MADAME CHOLET (Mike Batt)
• performed by The Wombles
• original source: 7" CBS 2842 (UK) 11/74; the B-side originally appeared on LP WOMBLING SONGS CBS 65803 (UK) 1973 and the A-side appeared contemporarily on LP KEEP ON WOMBLING CBS 80526 (UK) 1974
• and my source: 2CD THE CHRISTMAS ALBUM Global Television/Warner Music/Sony Entertainment RADCD152X (UK) 1999

.....After Batt left the franchise new releases slowed to a trickle. Ten years after he started, the label released LP THE WOMBLES CHRISTMAS ALBUM CBS 25805 (UK) 1983. Rather than an actual Christmas album, it was a compilation of previously released material with "WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS" as the lead track. This was not only a dirty trick, it wasn't even an original dirty trick. The Pickwick label licensed a similar batch of album tracks from CBS for their LP THE WOMBLES CHRISTMAS PARTY Hallmark Records SHM977 (UK) 1978 five years earlier. The one bright light was that the Christmas song was reissued (with a later hit as the new B-side) in 1983 with the album. For Christmas 1989 CBS released a greatest hits album ending with the Christmas song (novelty song or not, it was a bone fide pop hit at #2). In 2000 Batt teamed up with Roy Wood for a new recording of the song, this time spliced with Wood's perennial Wizzard hit, "I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY" for the once in a lifetime mouthful, "I WISH IT COULD BE A WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY". This year however the original is being reissued (this week in fact) in a typically Womblish altruistic attempt to drown out the bad taste of Simon Cowell's "X Factor" with their very own "W FACTOR" compilation. Check out the video online. (For American readers: the twin Wombles with the mile-high pompadours who appear to be 'auditioning' in the video are a parody of real life would-be teen pop stars John and Edward Grimes, notorious X Factor contestants.) Don't just do it for England; do it for all of us. Godspeed, you Wombles.

.....So come this Boxing Day when you look around you at the remnants and fallout of the holiday and your newsfeed of choice is choked with end-of-year "best" lists and the unshakeable implications that the world has had just about enough of this year and has crumpled it up for a premature tossing, remember that you're a Womble. Others may conclude that this Christmas has fulfilled its purpose and discarded it. If so, pick it up and you may discover that it has a whole year to it that's only just beginning. And you'll be the only one trying to figure out just what its purpose will be.