The Yellow Gollipersons

Emmett Hennessy recently unearthed a piece of British exploitation film memorabilia from the early days of his acting career, in the form of this call sheet for the film that would become The Yellow Teddy Bears, but at the time was still known as The Yellow Golliwog.

For those unfamiliar with The Yellow Teddybears, Robert Hartford-Davis’ 1963 film was based on a tabloid expose which discovered that schoolgirls were adopting the golliwog badges issued by the Robertson’s Jam Company as a coded way of notifying other girls that they had become sexually active. While Hartford-Davis’ film dramatizes this story, it was at some point forced to change the girls’ use of golliwog badges to teddy bear badges. Some sources have suggested –not implausibly- that Robertson’s Jam took objection to their badges being used to signify cherry-loss in a low-budget exploitation movie and forbade their use in The Yellow Teddy Bears. However the film’s own producer Tony Tenser, pointed to the British censors as being the ones who nixed the idea of golliwog imagery appearing in the film (quoted in the book ‘Beasts in the Cellar’ Tenser claimed head censor John Trevelyan “was not happy with the title…he thought it could be racist…so I said what if we change it to The Yellow Teddy Bears, which is even better than golliwogs anyway”). As both of these accounts imply the decision to change the title and the use of golliwog badges was taken in the pre-production stages, neither explains why The Yellow Golliwog title was still being used on the call-sheet. A fact that instead suggests the use of Golliwog in the title was only discovered to be problematic whilst the film was in production.

 

 

 

Ironically, by the late 1990s it was Robertson’s use of golliwog imagery on its products that would find itself on the cultural naughty step while the passing of time had in comparison robbed The Yellow Teddy Bears of any controversy. Indeed, despite the best efforts of VHS cover girl Emily Booth/Bouffante to sex-up the film on its 1998 video sleeve, the film itself couldn’t achieve anything stronger than a tame PG rating.