If you grew up in the UK during the early 2000s, chances are you caught an episode or two of Bill & Ben, the Cosgrove Hall-produced reboot of the 1950s classic. With its soft clay animation and endearingly gibberish-speaking flowerpot men, it was a staple of Children’s BBC—later CBeebies—for kids just beginning to form memories. But there’s one episode you’ve never seen. Not on TV, not online, and certainly not mentioned in official BBC archives. Internally at Cosgrove Hall, it had a name: The Petal Garden Incident.
According to ex-staff at Cosgrove Hall, the episode was the result of an internal experiment—one not meant for broadcast. The studio was experimenting with abstract, subconscious imagery and horror concepts for a new adult anthology series. Someone, allegedly a writer named "Stuart N.", jokingly pitched the idea of “Bill and Ben in purgatory,” playing off the idea that their garden world was too peaceful, too isolated.
The animators, under heavy production schedules and perhaps looking to blow off steam, decided to use the Bill & Ben models as a mockup for a psychological horror concept—never intended to be aired. But something went wrong. Very wrong. The footage was mistakenly catalogued as a rough cut for the actual show and included in early distribution reels for overseas broadcasters. The BBC caught it before airing, but test viewers in Norway and Japan were not so lucky.
The intro begins as usual. The tinkling music plays. The flowers sway. You hear the gentle narration: “Bill and Ben… the Flowerpot Men.” But in this version, something’s off.
The music is slower. Dragged out. Like it’s melting. The sky looks darker. There’s a sound—very faint at first—of a baby wailing. As the intro continues, the wailing grows louder. Sharper. Soon it’s not a baby at all, but a guttural, demonic moan. The flowers twist unnaturally toward the screen. The screen flashes with violent cuts—frames of something unrecognizable. Blood? Raw meat? A hospital room?
Then the colors invert. The entire screen floods with a deep, arterial red. The music cuts. All that’s left is the sound of panting. Not from Bill or Ben—but from something alive.
Without a title card, we cut to the garden—only it’s dim, suffocatingly grey. Bill and Ben are strapped to a crude wooden table, their clay arms tied with rough twine. Their mouths are sealed. No “flobbadob.”
Weed is standing over them. She doesn’t speak, but her leaves twitch in a rhythmic pattern—signalling, commanding. Pry the magpie flies in first, landing on Ben's chest. Then Boo, Whoops, Scamper, and finally Slowcoach arrive, surrounding the helpless flowerpot men.
They begin pulling. Slowly at first, then with increasing force. Bill’s left arm is yanked off, revealing not clay—but flesh. A squirming, bloodied human baby arm. The others work in sync, peeling away the clay skin until, lying on the table where Bill and Ben once were, are two writhing, shrieking real human babies. Their eyes blink open—and they look straight at the camera.
The scene cuts without warning to real-life footage. The ocean. Grey, stormy waves slamming against jagged rocks. Then, a cliffside. Handheld footage now. A baby, perhaps nine months old, crawls on all fours toward the edge of the cliff. There are no adult voices—just the sound of distant seagulls, and the wind.
Then the baby falls.
There is no music. Just a piercing scream—female, primal. The camera shakes violently, and the screen cuts to static.
We return to the garden one last time. The clay aesthetic is back—but it’s cruder. Bill and Ben, now baby-sized versions of themselves, sit huddled in the mud. They look up and smile weakly.
Then, from the cracks in the ground, come ants. Hundreds. Thousands. With sharp, exaggerated mandibles. They swarm the baby versions of Bill and Ben. There’s no screaming—just the quiet crunch of consumption. Clay limbs twitch, dissolve. The ants consume everything.
Fade to black.
The BBC never aired the episode. After a catastrophic test screening with an internal panel—including parents, psychologists, and executives—the footage was flagged and officially locked in the BBC’s content vault. Some even say it was physically destroyed.
But copies had already leaked. A Norwegian children's block aired it once by mistake before pulling the episode mid-broadcast. In Japan, it aired in full during an overnight block meant for preschoolers, prompting multiple complaints and a quiet apology from NHK. The episode became known in international broadcaster logs as “B&B-RedRend01”.
After the incident, Cosgrove Hall quietly dismantled the original Bill & Ben production team. When the BBC commissioned them again, it was to focus on simpler, gentler reboots. Their next task? A reboot of Andy Pandy—released in 2002 with muted pastels and slow, meditative pacing. There were no more experiments. No more “adult horror mockups.”
They never mentioned The Petal Garden Incident again.
But sometimes… when watching Bill & Ben reruns on old VHS tapes, the screen flickers red for just a single frame.
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