First watched : Uncertain
Moving onto Monday 7 October 1968 and the Watch With Mother slot at 13.30 which was occupied by Tales Of The Riverbank.
I have no separate memory of the show in its BBC days. The show , loosely based on The Wind In The Willows , was originally bought from Canada in 1960 with Johnny Morris replacing the Canadian narrators. It ran for 13 episodes and proved so popular the BBC commissioned another 39 which were filmed on the Isle of Wight between 1961 and 1962. The sustained popularity of the show led to its revival in 1972-3 although because the BBC suits had taken a dislike to anthropomorphism i.e matching voices to live animals it went over to a grateful ITV and was renamed Hammy Hamster .
By that time I'm afraid I found it silly and boring. We didn't have a hamster until 1979 so there was nothing for me to engage with, watching a few tame rodents clambering over toys. It can't have been an easy job for the cameramen, waiting around on the alert for the animals doing what they were supposed to for a few seconds and capturing it in a usable form. Apparently all the animals were released into the wild at the end of the series and unsurprisingly perished fairly quickly.
Its brief revival in the 90s on Channel 5 and CGI film version which went straight to DVD in 2008 passed me by entirely.
I know many regard it very fondly but it's a no from me.
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