" ..... in Season 5, Episode 6, you said that: 'Stephen says an odd couple of rhyming lines about a flowerpot...' What he actually says is 'Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot men':

Bill and Ben is an afternoon programme for very young children and is a story about two small men who are flowerpots and their female friend (Named Weed) who is a weed. She has a high, squeaky voice and is usually called "Little Weed". Whenever anyone speaks to her the usual reply is a very squeaky "weeeeeeed". Bill and Ben themselves speak gibberish. For example:

"Ohhh shlobalobalob", which is followed by Little Weed's squeaky reply, "Weeeeeed".

The three of them play together in a garden and the story usually ends with the gardener coming back from his lunch break and Bill and Ben disappearing back into their flowerpots.

Just thought I'd let you know this!"

Thanks to Emma for this explanation and for offering an interesting bit of trivia.

This email, of course, piqued my curiosity so I found the photo of the threesome on the web at the whirligig-tv Watch with Mother website in the UK which also had the following article:

In 1952 The Flowerpot Men were added to Watch With Mother on Wednesdays. The identical puppets, Bill and Ben were made out of flowerpots, their hands made out of large gardening gloves, and feet of hobnailed boots.

With their 'flibadobs' and 'flobadobs' as their way of communicating, they lived in two giant flowerpots at the bottom of the garden, behind the potting shed. They would secretly pop their head over the parapet that was the flowerpot when the gardener went home for a bit of lunch.The merest hint of the approach of 'The Gardener' was enough to send them scurrying back to their pots.

Keeping counsel was their neighbour Little Weed, who alerted them to any danger and a tortoise friend called Slowcoach made frequent visits. The burning issue of the day was always "Was it Bill or was it Ben?".

The storyline of Bill and Ben was more or less the same in every episode: The gardener goes off for his dinner; Bill and Ben appear from their flowerpots; Little Weed says "Weeeeeeed"; a minor mishap occurs; someone is guilty. "Which of those two flowerpot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?" the narrator trills, in a quavering soprano; the villain confesses; the gardener's footsteps are heard coming up the garden path; the flowerpot men vanish into their pots and the closing credits roll:

The Flowerpot Men's language, officially called Oddle Poddle, was notable for being almost completely incomprehensible: "Waddle oo tikoo dop? Gloob a waddle a hop" for example, translates as "What do you think of that? Gloves as well as a hat." The show was much criticised at the time for promoting immaturity, but it achieved the status of a classic.

...In 2000, after more than 30 years in mothballs, The Flowerpot Men were revived by the BBC as a new 13-part series. In the new version, instead of the all-too-obvious strings and wobbly wooden frames, the new Bill and Ben had malleable metal skeletons beneath brightly-coloured rubber faces and resin bodies; and Little Weed had undergone an image change from the squeaky little sunflower of the earlier series into an "earth-mother". The new series thus seemed to lose some of the quirky charm and innocence of the original.