| abstract | - The Wombles was a television documentary in 1970 directed by British underground reporter Elisabeth Beresford. The Wombles were radioactively deformed migrant workers, the result of catastrophic accidents in secret diamond mines under London, England. Survivors suffered hideous deformations, the worst cases being little more than pointy-nosed furry creatures. Shunned and considered "nearly invisible" by society, they spent their lives shuffling through underground shanty towns full of scavenged rubbish. The term 'Womble' originated from a frightful experience Beresford had when encountering a deformed worker lost during daylight on Wimbledon Common, attempting to remain inconspicuous by wearing his tidy bag on his head. When Beresford challenged him, he decided to reply, but the combination of headwear and facial deformity reduced his speech to a mumble of "wom..ble... wom... ble". The name is appropriate, for Wombles are notorious mumblers, and will often try to evade conversation by standing pensively and mumbling at the sky. In the television documentary, the Wombles' own mumbling voices were considered impossible for most viewers to understand. Subtitles were trialled but were found to be offensive (the programme's Chief of Womble-ese was later judged to have been overenthusiastic in his translation), and it remains a little known fact that the majority of Wombles in the broadcast version of the documentary were, in fact, re-voiced by Bernard Cribbens. Subsequent Blu-ray editions have included the original incomprehensible soundtrack, plus alternate soundtrack voicings by Nigel Planar, Andrew Sachs and Sandi Toksvig. The 2015 Blu-ray includes an audition by Ringo Starr, which is quickly terminated when it becomes apparent that his voices for the different characters all sound like Ringo Starr. The original documentary was aired daily in short segments over all five weekdays, presenting itself as a soap opera with a jolly theme and opening images of the most presentable survivors shuffling happily through their burrows. But as the series progressed, it revealed the plight of those banished underground after the diamond mines collapsed, venturing up only at night to claim the things everyday folk left behind. In their scavenging, they were inspired by the earlier Borrower movement of the 1930s, when large numbers of little people had turned to petty theft of everyday items such as thimbles, scissors and thread. The late collapse of the Borrowers movement into outright and shameless kleptomania was a key influence on the Wimbledon Wombles vowing only to scavenge items that were clearly "left behind". Elisabeth Beresford looked past the deformities of the Wombles and showed their human side to a forgetful public and an even more forgetful government, gaining these poor furry bastards valuable prestige, as well as better air-conditioning and a string of top 40 hits.
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