It’s big and it’s yellow, but there’s no tea in it

Bluebird was founded on two very solid principles. Small girls like doll’s houses. Small girls also like plastic tea sets for serving cups of invisible tea to their dollies. Then someone fell into a filing cabinet at the office Christmas party and came up with the bizarre idea of crossbreeding the two. Yes, this was a doll’s house, but made of yellow plastic and shaped like a huge teapot.

Why was this? No reason was ever given. The house was inhabited by small plastic peg-like people (somewhere between stunted Playmobil folk and Weebles without the wobble) with welded-together legs, all the better to slide them down the chimney or make them ride round and round in the roundabout-cum-teapot lid (the latter twenty seconds of entertainment - “lots of fun for everyone” - also forming the most memorable moment of the accompanying ad). This delightful pied-a-terre was furnished throughout with a small quantity of monolithic red and blue teacup chairs and tables, with the further appointment of additional décor simply printed on cardboard walls (where it floated slightly above the floor in an unconvincing fashion).

A rival effort came courtesy of Palitoy, whose Family Treehouse obeyed the same basic design principles, yet had the added bonus of a trunk-based elevator (which presumably attracted a better class of tenant than the average council estate Teapot). Another was Matchbox’s School Boot, adding a whiff of academia to the old “woman who lived in a shoe” routine and thus robbing it of much appeal, although there were at least a variety of playground-themed accessories¹.

Basically, Big Yellow was a doll’s house for the Duplo generation; those who required everything to be large, unbreakable and safe to chew, yet were still innocent enough to refrain from shoving the little plastic people down (or up) the cat for a change (or indeed, trying to create a teapot tropical monsoon by actually pouring boiling water on them).