Hamble In The Sight Of The Bored

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What is the first thing you think of when someone mentions the name ‘Hamble’? Hampshire’s famous River Hamble, which is tidal for approximately half its length and navigable in its lower reaches? Perhaps its close geographical neighbour Hamble-Le-Rice, the popular yachting mecca as proudly featured in BBC TV’s Howards’ Way? How about Fairey Aviation’s pioneering early Twentieth Century single-seat fighter seaplane the ‘Hamble’?

No, chances are you think of an ugly plastic doll. ‘Hamble’ was, and is, most widely recognised as the peculiarly awkward monicker bestowed on one such ugly plastic doll as featured for over twenty years in the BBC’s absurdist combination of White Void Studio-delivered songs and stories and failed or failing folkie singer-songwriters and stand-up comics, Play School. Blessed with neither the pop-art colour schematics of her plusher pals Jemima and Humpty, nor the sturdily-upholstered stiff upper lip of Big Ted and Little Ted (or indeed their earlier counterpart, the budget-conscious mono-sized catch-all ‘Teddy’), Hamble stood out like, well, an ugly plastic doll in a cast of toys that you might actually want to own yourself. She was nobody’s favourite – even the presenters hated her – and yet, doubtless due to her sheer incongruity, she’s as well remembered as any other icon from children’s television of yesteryear.

Here, then – because nobody else will ever tell it, and rightly so – is ‘her’ story.

Hamble was intended by the production team as a nod towards recognition of the lower end of the social spectrum, kind of like a sort of ugly plastic doll equivalent of Duquan from The Wire. To this end, they eschewed the usual practice of specially comissioning the relevant prop and opted instead to simply purchase a mass-produced Queen-faced stubby-limbed bird’s-nest-haired jointed plastic doll from Woolworths, even retaining its original retail name for additional Down With Da Kidz-ness. This, excitingly, meant that any child watching could own their own Hamble and identify with all the songs about her going to the grocers (and what did she buy there?) just that little bit more. Except that no child watching wanted to own their own Hamble, what with her being utterly devoid of character and looking even more hideous under the glare of studio lights, opting instead for the hopelessly desperate policy of renaming their own disparate-looking bears in honour of Big Ted and Little Ted, and wondering why nobody saw fit to mass-produce Humpty or Jemima.

And it wasn’t just the viewers who detested Hamble. The show’s presenters were just as full of loathing, with the added advantage of being able to physically do something about it. Tales are told of recording being interrupted when the hapless doll was subjected to obscene pen and ink anatomical additions, hoisted aloft on a noose, and impaled on a knitting needle (as punishment for failure to remain upright for the duration of a take), and sometimes the violence inflicted upon it was so severe that sufficient damage was sustained to warrant emergency admission to the nearest Doll’s Hospital. By this time, mass production of the ‘Hamble’ had long since ceased, and the BBC were unable to locate a duplicate to function as an illness-covering Stunt-Hamble. To this end they hired an identical example from a doll collector, who loaned her prized grotesquery for extortionate sums, though clearly anyone in their right mind would have paid to have Hamble taken off their hands, and indeed any production team in their right mind would have taken any excuse to ditch the unpopular horror. Their refusal to do so can only really strengthen the beliefs of the smaller subset of child viewers who believed – not entirely unreasonably – that Hamble was ‘evil’ and disseminating coded messages to Charles Manson through the medium of films seen through differently-shaped windows, and as such had some sort of sinister hold over the production team. Meanwhile, overseas purchasers of Play School in infamous ‘kit’ form wasted no time in ditching Hamble and crossing her name out of the provided scripts, though it has to be said that even this treatment pales next to the curious insistence of the Swiss on nailing Humpty down.

Few tears were shed when, in 1983, as part of an overall Play School overhaul that also introduced zany knockabout comedy, updated theme music and, but of course, “Flying Pickets-style ‘psh-psssssssssssh!’ percussion”, Hamble was ditched and replaced with inclusivity-slanted ethnic doll Poppy. And it’s in this later Poppy-equipped lineup that the toys now reside in the National Media Museum in Bradford, with the whereabout of the original Hamble troublingly unknown (though rumours persist that it is currently held on Level 5 of Primatech Research). Meanwhile, surviving examples of retail-purchased Hambles occasionally surface on eBay, where they routinely change hands for upwards of £100. Never did the phrase ‘more money than sense’ seem more worryingly apposite.