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00:00Music
00:22Not very long ago, in the bottom right hand corner of England,
00:27there was an old cowshed, a barn and four pigsties.
00:31And there, more than forty years ago, Oliver Postgate, that's me,
00:36and Peter Furman, the artist and illustrator,
00:38started to make small films for children's television.
00:46I am noggin' the nog.
00:48And Bagpuss was wide awake.
00:54That voice of Oliver Postgate must be among the most recognisable voices
00:58in our British culture.
01:01There's something about it that is so kindly and so warm,
01:04it draws you in so easily.
01:10Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
01:13What a tangle of old rubbish.
01:15He'd be ankle deep in film, you know, and it had a very characteristic smell to it,
01:19you know, you'd sort of go in there and it was, to the untrained eye,
01:24a complete chaos, you know.
01:27The most magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world.
01:34Always there was something being filmed or something was always going on.
01:40It felt very normal, being dressing up as a Victorian child.
01:44It didn't seem absurd.
01:48The marvellous mechanical mouse organ.
01:52Really, the way Oliver tells stories and what he's telling the stories about,
01:56a lot of it are about people cooperating in a rural or a non-industrial background
02:02and reusing things.
02:04Well, it's quite obvious what that is all about.
02:08But the heart of Oliver's background was a socialist left-wing background.
02:14You can see that that left labour background is distilled into these little films that he made.
02:22After all, what woodclangers want with real money?
02:25You can't eat it, can you?
02:27In terms of their cultural influence and impact, they punch way above their weight.
02:32It is the most important, most beautiful, most magical, saggy old home-made animations.
02:39That is a clanger.
02:57And that is another clanger.
03:01They seem to have a piece of rope.
03:04The clangers contained all of the trademark post-Gatean elements, if you like,
03:10the things that really, for me, drew me in as a child.
03:13And that was this separate world.
03:16Soup! They want soup!
03:19Better ask tiny clangers.
03:21And here we had this contained world of what appeared to be a family of clangers.
03:25Basically, they just got on with things.
03:28But were surrounded by this absurd community of objects and peripheral characters, if you like.
03:36There was a cloud.
03:38There was an iron chicken who was slightly delinquent.
03:43There was obviously the soup dragon and the soup wells.
03:53Oh, look, Oliver, I found the world.
04:00And I found the whistle.
04:01Oh, yes.
04:02Oh, the whistle.
04:03Yeah.
04:04Yeah, that's the whistle.
04:05This is major clangers whistle.
04:06It's a very low register.
04:16I hope you understood that.
04:18Well, I wonder how I can explain.
04:21Funnily enough, you know, I just grew up thinking that was the sound of the clangers.
04:25I didn't realise it was a musical instrument.
04:27So, I think probably most people would, when they hear that swanny whistle, they think it's the clangers.
04:33What's absolutely stunning about the clangers is how few words there are in it.
04:45So, what he's doing, if you think about it, what he's doing, he's doing mime and he's doing sound.
04:50The mime comes from the little woolly clangers and the sound is coming from the swanny whistle.
04:55Now, I wonder if this machine is going to work.
04:59What the child is doing is reading those images and reading those peculiar sounds of the swanny whistle.
05:12And that's staggering because you're, in a sense, you're saying to the child, go ahead, go and do that.
05:30You know, you're leaving a space for the child to do the interpreting.
05:35So, it's very active television.
05:39Oh dear, that's not one of his best machines.
05:42So, they drag it away and try again with something else.
06:00It was something that we found that we didn't know existed.
06:04And, you know, after Oliver died, we found these scripts.
06:12This is how Oliver wrote the clangers.
06:14So, he would narrate this side.
06:17Everything would be written here.
06:19And on this side, it actually has what the clangers say.
06:24Of course, they don't actually speak in the programme.
06:26So, this is what would be whistled with the swanny whistle.
06:29So, hi, where's Charlie?
06:32You know, and there was this sort of notorious line,
06:36which was used in the toys that were made of the clangers.
06:39Where they say...
06:44And he was very pleased about this,
06:45because what he was actually saying was...
06:48Oh, damn it.
06:50The bee thing's stuck again.
06:53Which is probably the bloody thing stuck again.
07:02The clangers must have been one of the first television shows I ever watched.
07:11I like the homemade quality,
07:12because I like that you can look at them and work out sort of how they were made.
07:18And you could recognise the props and bits of the set,
07:23and you kind of knew how they'd done it,
07:26and that you might be able to do it yourself.
07:29What a lot of...
07:30Here it are.
07:31Ah, yes, that's the one.
07:32A skeleton.
07:33That's it.
07:34Yeah, yeah, yeah.
07:35There they move.
07:36That's the actual work of it.
07:38He really comes from blokes in garden sheds,
07:41fiddling around, making things.
07:43What are you doing?
07:44I'm making a film in the garden shed.
07:46I mean, it's...
07:47And you can see it in the film.
07:49You can hear it in the films.
07:50I mean, it really is small films.
07:52I mean, it's handmade.
07:54As you see, it's made of the same thing as everybody has skeletons of bones and ball joints.
07:59These are Meccano on the arms, with little bits in between.
08:04And it's stiff, you see.
08:06It stays where it's put.
08:07And that's...
08:08If you imagine that stuffed inside a clanger,
08:11you could put his arms exactly where you want.
08:14There he goes.
08:15He can stand on one foot.
08:17Actually...
08:18Yeah, that's Mother.
08:20This is the father of the family, Major Clanger.
08:23And that's Mother.
08:24Now, that's his second wife.
08:26His first wife was stolen!
08:28The BBC had an exhibition in the 60s of the Clangers.
08:31But someone pinched Mother Clanger.
08:34So, after the films were made,
08:36we then had a new marriage
08:39which took place between him and her.
08:41So, that's his new wife.
08:43There was that scene in Doctor Who with the Master
08:46watching television,
08:48and he thought it was a life form.
08:51What are you watching?
09:06It seems to be a rather interesting extraterrestrial life form.
09:12Only puppets, you know.
09:14For children.
09:15Oh.
09:26Postgate recognised that the Clangers,
09:28ultimately, as well as being a wonderful storytelling vehicle for children,
09:32was also an opportunity to make comment about the world.
09:35Four.
09:36Three.
09:37Two.
09:38One.
09:39Zero.
09:40We have committed.
09:42By the time we got to the late 60s at that time,
09:45we knew so much more about the rest of the world,
09:47the impact of the space race,
09:49and the aspiration that we might move beyond the bounds of Earth.
09:53The idea that the moon, the stars, the galaxy, the universe,
09:56was out there, and was a challenge for humankind.
09:59To the conclusion that this dance is a symbol
10:02of the insatiable curiosity of all mankind.
10:06Of all the stars and moons and planets that shine in the sky,
10:12by far the most troublesome is surely this one.
10:16This small, cloud-covered planet is our Earth,
10:20the home of the human race.
10:23Oliver set himself apart from the kind of mainstream enthusiasm
10:29about technology and about space and about bombs that was going on
10:34in the late 50s, 60s and into the 70s.
10:37You know, he was a member of CND,
10:39and you can see at the beginning of the Clangers,
10:41he is saying, look, when we look at the Earth, it is beautiful,
10:46just as, you know, Apollo and Neil Armstrong and the rest looked back
10:51and could see the Earth, that it is beautiful,
10:54but at the heart of what Oliver is saying at the beginning there,
10:57this is the most troubled and troublesome planet of all.
11:01We have war, we cannot, we are not solving the problems of the world.
11:06Satellites, spent rockets, and other unwanted articles
11:12litter the orbits of the Earth and the space beyond.
11:16Who can say where some of this expensive rubbish
11:21may ultimately arrive as it hurtles aimlessly through the universe?
11:27Look, it's cracking some more.
11:38It's a baby penguin.
11:40There's a good baby penguin.
11:44It's all right.
11:46Look, there's Papa.
11:49Say hello to Papa.
11:51I never knew, when I first met Oliver,
11:55that his dad was a person I'd read in the sixth form.
11:59Raymond, Postgate and GDH Cole, the common people.
12:03So at the heart of Oliver's background was a socialist left-wing Labour Party.
12:10I mean, his grandfather was George Lansbury.
12:12This was somebody who led one of the most famous revolts
12:16from a local council when they fought the cuts, basically, in Poplar.
12:21And in fact, quite hard to relate it to the programmes that he made.
12:25But actually, when you look at the programmes,
12:27it's not that they're socialist propaganda or anything like that,
12:30but you can see their drawing on left-wing Labour traditions.
12:34Will that do instead of soup?
12:36I don't think it will. They can't eat that.
12:42Ray was very large.
12:46He was a classically educated man
12:49who had come into the socialist movement,
12:54you know, at its inception.
12:56And I remember we used to go and stay at Radfields,
12:59which people described as Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh.
13:02And I can remember a little fat man
13:05who liked to play games but always cheated,
13:08who was called H.G. Wells,
13:10and a rather thin, ratty man
13:12whom everybody deferred to, rather,
13:14who was actually Bertrand Russell.
13:16And I had no idea how important these people were, you know.
13:20The great thing which all the people at that time
13:22seemed to have in common
13:24was a sense of having a great future.
13:27The world was leading into a socialist-type future
13:32in which all its difficulties would disappear,
13:36and that they were going to make that future.
13:38This is the quality which they had.
13:40They were the makers of the future.
13:42You're quite right there.
13:44What a lot of bosh indeed.
13:46I've never heard such rubbish.
13:48That's the paddles! Yes!
13:50Look, these wildos!
13:52Look, feathers for oars!
13:54I reckon it's just as silly digging gold as blowing bubbles.
14:00Dartington was a remarkable school.
14:04It was an experiment, really,
14:06in treating children rationally and affectionately.
14:10So, although they had to go to lessons,
14:13all the staff were known by their Christian names.
14:17There was nude swimming in the morning,
14:21lots of emphasis on art and drama,
14:24and a very friendly place.
14:27All of children's literature and all of children's films,
14:33they're all informed by an idea
14:35that there is some ideal place.
14:37And this ideal place may be childhood,
14:40it may be the time before there was industry,
14:43before there was somehow or other
14:45the world got corrupted by us adults.
14:48And I can imagine there's quite a link between
14:52this bohemian heaven in the garden
14:56around Dartington
14:58with the kind of worlds that Oliver created in his films.
15:02Don't be daft, Jones.
15:04Fish don't have time off.
15:06Everybody has to have some time off, Di.
15:09Maybe it's time for you to put down your fishing rod
15:12and have a snooze in the sun like me.
15:14By making a musical wheel.
15:17I was a failed actor.
15:19I remained failed for a long time.
15:21But I always also worked in a bun factory.
15:25I did lots and lots of different things.
15:27But I was, yes, throughout my life
15:29I was launching myself into follies of different sorts
15:31and they would come a cropper and I would dump them.
15:35Very interesting.
15:39Now what next?
15:41In the early 50s, Postgate was involved
15:43in all sorts of machine making
15:45and basically he was a toy maker.
15:47And he got into television
15:49on the basis really of creating
15:51what he thought were going to be children's toys.
15:53He made a virtuoso pig, for example.
15:57And this attracted him to the mechanism
15:59of making animation.
16:03We were very impressed.
16:05There was this gentleman came down from the telly
16:07you know, to ask me to do drawings.
16:09Joan always claims that,
16:11as my wife Joan always claims,
16:13that she noticed that he wore brown shoes
16:15with a blue suit and she thought,
16:17well, he must be alright then.
16:19So we were content.
16:21He had so many ideas.
16:23He was full of confidence.
16:25He gave me confidence
16:27to work for this strange medium
16:29called the television.
16:31Alexander the Mouse.
16:33He got commissioned to do a series of programs
16:35called Alexander the Mouse.
16:37And he was very excited about the stories.
16:38Alexander was going to be
16:39the mouse who would be king.
16:41In essence, what it was was cut out figures
16:43and magnets would move the figures along
16:45from behind.
16:47And of course, magnets attract.
16:49And suddenly, Alexander was bouncing
16:51all over the screen as various magnetic pubs
16:53clashed and so forth.
16:55Hands would appear on screen
16:57during live broadcasts.
16:59So it was very primitive,
17:01but nevertheless still very charming
17:03in its amateur, handcrafted way.
17:07All ready? Right then.
17:09A pretty, sad, sweet serenade
17:13for Mrs Pogel.
17:15One, two...
17:17Two.
17:26My mum was married to Peter Myers,
17:28a famous theatre writer.
17:31And they were splitting up at the time.
17:34And so my mum and my dad sort of
17:38got it together.
17:40And there's a picture of our mother.
17:43Prue.
17:44Probably when they first knew each other.
17:46Yeah.
17:47That's when I used to talk to my father
17:49and I used to say,
17:50what do you think I should do?
17:52Dad, I don't know, you know,
17:54what shall I do with my life?
17:56And he would say to me,
17:57well, I didn't know what I...
17:59what to do with my life
18:01until I met your mother.
18:03And I adopted...
18:04I immediately...
18:05Your mother came along with three children
18:07and I had to look after three children
18:09and, you know, and support the family.
18:11And so I just had to get on with it.
18:15It's hatched.
18:25The egg is hatched.
18:27Soup time.
18:28Come on, everybody.
18:29Soup time.
18:30And Oliver then, of course, got his camera and, you know, decided to make...
18:40He was fed up with this sort of rather hazardous method of animation.
18:44So he decided to make films and he taught himself stop frame animation.
18:50Set up his camera in his room and started thinking of ideas for animation.
18:57So this was just an ordinary Bolex camera, which wasn't sort of designed to be used as a single frame camera.
19:04And so he rigged it up with Meccano.
19:07And he also attached an engine at the back here, a motor.
19:11That would be the automatic aspect.
19:13When he got...
19:14When that was going or he switched it on, he'd have to make the movement and then get back again and make the movement and then get back again.
19:20And if he made a mistake, you know, his hand would be in there.
19:24And in the early films, it did occasionally sort of make an appearance.
19:29So this was the manual control and this was the automatic.
19:32The thing to point out with all Oliver's stuff was that he would build everything up from scratch.
19:38So, you know, as with the...
19:41This is the flat animation desk you would have where he did either the engine or noggin the nog.
19:47And so he would build everything that he used from scratch and then fix the camera in there, you know.
19:54We will find it, we will bind it, we will stick it with glue, we will bind it, we will stick it with glue, we will stick it with glue, we will fix it like new, new, new.
20:07He was trying to think of the sort of characters that might be suitable for animation on a table.
20:13To avoid legs, legs are a great problem with animation.
20:17So he thought wheels and then he thought, well, wheels, engines, locomotives, where do locomotives come from?
20:24Wales, you know, there's a lot of little steam engines in Wales.
20:27And so that's how either the engine was bought.
20:30Not very long ago, in the top left hand corner of Wales, there was a railway.
20:39It wasn't a very long railway, or a very important railway, but it was called the Merioneth and Lantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, and it was all there was.
20:52And in a shed, in a siding, at the end of the railway, lived the locomotive of the Merioneth and Lantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited,
20:59which was a long name for a little engine, so his friends just called him Ivor.
21:04Our animation wasn't so much an imitation of life, it was a punctuation of conversation.
21:11And always, we always stayed on the one who was talking, and it made for a very simple film, which was very clear,
21:16and there was no unnecessary things going on around the ages.
21:21You know, I wonder sometimes, Di, looking up in the sky about, well, you know, life on other planets and that.
21:30Oh yes, there is.
21:32There is.
21:33If I'm going to say something to you, well, I'll do it with a certain amount of gestures, but in between times, I'm completely still, you see.
21:41And I've only just made four or five movements then. Mind you, they wouldn't be what I was doing,
21:45because I'm a bit self-conscious at the moment. But that was the point.
21:49This is how we managed to get through 120 seconds a day, where most studios get through 10 seconds a day.
21:53We never move a mouth.
21:54Oh, we never haven't had a mouth. We changed the expression, we didn't bother with the mouth, because people were watching the hands.
21:59I got a book about it. Little green men with pointed heads there.
22:04Oh, don't be daft, Di. No, it's true.
22:07That way we managed to be fairly economical, but actually, in the end, extremely powerful in what we had to say.
22:14Just one thumb like that. Listen, Jones, what are you doing with that?
22:18I don't know. And there's only three moves in the whole thing.
22:21When they land, they look like petrol pumps and say, take me to your leader.
22:26Never!
22:27Yes, I've seen one. There's a lot about nowadays. Look, there's one now.
22:33What, a little green man? No, a flying saucer, silly. The little green men are inside.
22:40Oh, this is interesting. I remember this was a trip that Oliver and me made to open a train in Wales.
22:51They thought he'd made the magic roundabout, but it turns out he'd made Ivor the engine, but they were happy with that.
22:56And they'd called the trainer Dougal. He was very nervous about Ivor the engine because he does the Welsh accent quite a lot in it.
23:12And he was worried that the Welsh might take a little bit of umbrage at this, but they translated it into Welsh.
23:21Oh, hold on, Ivor. What's going on over there?
23:36The first ones were a bit less successful than the later ones because he made the films and then recorded the sound on top.
23:46And that's always a bit difficult because you're trying to keep up with the action on the film and your voice and, you know, it didn't work so well.
23:54But later on, he learnt that he should record the soundtrack with the effects and everything and make a sort of radio programme first.
24:02And then the film could be made on very strict lines.
24:07Here, in this shot, you see the way he's kind of, he's laid everything out.
24:13He'd have his scripts here. He then had a sprocket counter where he counted how many frames.
24:20So you had the first sentence and then a number, sort of 16, and then the next sentence 32.
24:26And he'd calibrate the whole thing in that way before he started animating.
24:31And then he'd animate on the bolex, which had a counter on the side, but here.
24:36So he'd animate two of those numbers.
24:38And I used to sit next to him and write down the numbers as he called them out.
24:43Oh, did you? Oh, right, because I went up and did that once with him.
24:46And I don't think I ever did it again, actually. I found it a bit sort of boring.
24:52Did he pay you? I got a fiver.
24:59Ivor's world becomes one in the top left-hand corner of Wales, of course,
25:03that's predicated on the small concerns of being an engine driver,
25:08the local relationships with people, the small things that happen
25:12that kind of seem to be high crises in Ivor's world,
25:16but nevertheless become these things that everybody collectively can resolve.
25:20So those kind of aspects of Postgate's world are really quite important.
25:25But I think what's especially important about it is its Welshness.
25:29Oh, there's fancy bread, look.
25:33That's not bread, that's dragon.
25:35Oh, so it is, Edwin Jones.
25:38There's unusual now.
25:41If we think of Ivor and we think of Oliver and the left-wing tradition,
25:49where did some of this left-wing tradition come from?
25:52It came from Wales.
25:55That people who worked in Wales, particularly around the pits,
25:58they developed a sense of community that really left-wing Labour people said,
26:03this is the future, we must look to these people and the ideas that they're developing
26:08about how we can cooperate and how we can share.
26:12And it's quite interesting that he put that into a little children's film.
26:16Looking out of Ivor's funnel was a dragon.
26:19Not one of your lumping great fairy tale dragons,
26:22but a small, trim, heraldic Welsh dragon, glowing red-hot and smiling.
26:27Do you know Land of My Fathers?
26:30Oh, yes, of course. Certainly.
26:33Very appropriate, if I may say so.
26:36Come, ladies and gentlemen, Land of My Fathers, if you please.
26:48Ivor does have this ambition, and does indeed fulfil it,
26:51to sing in the choir,
26:53which, of course, is the expression of this community coming together
26:56with this single voice, and he wants to be part of that.
27:02And I think it's quite telling that they hold their choir practice
27:05on the railway tracks, because Ivor just seems to sort of drive in,
27:09and they're all assembled, the choir, the whole community are there,
27:12with Evans, the song, all ready to sing.
27:19Morning, Dye Station.
27:20Morning, Jones.
27:22One thing that was a huge influence on his work was Dylan Thomas,
27:26particularly Undermilk Wood.
27:29The wood, whose every tree foots cloven in the black glad sight
27:33of the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to me.
27:37There is a quality to Dylan Thomas's poetry, and Undermilk Wood,
27:42which is very melancholy, and very...
27:45has this sort of sadness to it, you know.
27:49and I think that is sort of shot through with all Oliver's work, you know,
27:56and makes it stand apart from a lot of other programmes, really,
28:00because it does have this dimension of sadness to it and melancholy.
28:06Everybody sang.
28:08And high and clear above their voices rang out the voices of the dragons,
28:12singing their gladness from the heart of their own
28:15permanently endowed gas-fired volcano.
28:21I think there is a very strong element of the past in their programmes.
28:25It's almost sort of like harking back to something that was never there, perhaps,
28:30you know, a sadness, because it was never there.
28:33A mistrust in above shall ring,
28:41a warrior shall rise there.
28:46In the lands of the north,
28:56where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea,
29:00in the dark night that is very long,
29:02the men of the north land sit by their great log fires,
29:05and they tell a tale.
29:07They tell of Noggin, prince of the Nogs,
29:10who sailed to the land of the midnight sun
29:12to fetch Nuka, princess of the Nukes, to be his queen.
29:15My favourite Postgate work is Noggin the Nog.
29:20I think people encounter Postgate's work at different times in their lives,
29:25and one of the things that was hugely appealing for me
29:28was the fact that there was this epic model of storytelling
29:31in a children's idiom,
29:33and in that was a villain, a major villain, Nogbad,
29:37and he was the first major villain that I discovered on television
29:40and really, really embraced and enjoyed.
29:42There it is at last, the sword of power.
29:49I had been to the British Museum drawing
29:51and noticed that the Isle of Lewis chessmen had marvellous characters,
29:56and I thought they had a story to tell.
29:59It got no further than just outlines and a couple of scripts.
30:05Oliver saw it and said this would be a great way of...
30:09He liked the idea and he liked the characters,
30:12and he thought he could develop this.
30:14It's not as if I ever did anybody any harm or anything.
30:18I'm just an ordinary, small, ice dragon, established, clerical grade.
30:22I was really too silly of people.
30:24Noggin did become the vehicle by which he became much more overtly political.
30:29You know, in Noggin and the Fire Cake it's hard not to read a very particular kind of address
30:34of the way in which the atomic bomb was being referenced
30:37and the way in which people with military power and with atomic power
30:41could be hugely self-destructive.
30:43Look out! Look out! Look out!
31:02Oliver was a conscientious objector at about 1942 when he became of age to be conscripted.
31:10I suspect more it was a mixture of family history
31:15and also a slight innate rebelliousness and anti-establishment thing that he kept all his life.
31:22His grandfather was a pacifist politician, George Lansbury,
31:27and he said, as far as I'm concerned you can put away the machines of war and all of it
31:36and just let the world do its worst.
31:38And then you had his father, Raymond, who was going to be taken out of Oxford
31:42and a one-time shot for being a conscientious objector.
31:46And then you had Oliver.
31:48The big mountain.
31:49You don't have to look so sad. They'll be alright. They will have flown home.
32:06But talking I made these, it is your rose garden.
32:12Oh, that's just what I wanted, a rose garden.
32:18I have a theory that Oliver and I both needed each other very badly because we're both second sons.
32:25And when you're a second son, you somehow rely upon your big brother to help you out and things.
32:31And I always think that I was never able to get on very far on my own with things.
32:39Oliver had various attempts at various inventions and jobs and things like that,
32:47but nothing seemed to happen very much until we got together and then we sort of sparked each other off.
32:58All that used to be my studio, that whole block there.
33:02But this bit now belongs to the horse.
33:05All I've got there here is glorified cupboard with all the bits in it.
33:13Look, there's 40 years of assorted tins.
33:16I haven't the slightest idea what's in them.
33:18One day I'm going to have to go through that lot.
33:20But not at the moment. It's a burden on my conscience, this lot. It's got to go.
33:25Oh, this is the joy of my life when I made it.
33:27This is a resistance device and it did a 40 frame dim.
33:34Every time I clicked the camera, this turned around once.
33:37So the light gradually went down and then when it came to do it again,
33:41I reversed the rubber band on this and it gradually came up again.
33:44All made of a Meccano and bits, yes.
33:48This is the press button. Click, click, click, click.
33:51That connection there made all the ivory engine foams.
33:55And when I was wanting to leave the camera running, I turned it on its back
33:58so it went on clicking until I came back.
34:00Yes, this was the instrument I had in my hand for years.
34:05Strange looking back, I haven't touched it for 15 years.
34:08It's just decay all around.
34:12We will stickle it, every little bit of it. We will fix it like new, new, new.
34:19He'd be ankle deep in film, you know, and it had a very characteristic smell to it.
34:23You know, he'd sort of go in there and he'd be sort of...
34:26Apart from the focus of what he was doing in particular,
34:29it was, to the untrained eye, a complete chaos.
34:34There's the big barn, look. There are usually penguins in the big barn,
34:48but of course it's no use charging in there looking for them because they would hide.
34:52Look, there's one. It's Penny, I think.
34:55Yes, that's her. She's looking for something.
34:58She's looking straight at us now.
35:00Keep very still and quiet and perhaps she won't notice us.
35:04My sister, Gloria, who knitted a toy for one of my children, a penguin doll,
35:10and it had been lying around in the house and one of the cats peed on it,
35:14so it had to be washed. Poor thing.
35:17So it was hanging on the line by its beak.
35:19This poor old penguin was hanging on the line, pegged by its beak,
35:23and Oliver came one day and looked at it
35:25and it gave him this brilliant idea of a story about penguins.
35:30So the film's opened with small penguin running down the garden,
35:36shouting to Papa Penguin, hanging on the line saying,
35:40Come on quickly, Papa. Mother's laid an egg.
35:43And Father says,
35:45I can't come. Can't you see I've just been washed and I'm not dry yet?
35:49You must come, you must come. Mama has laid an egg.
35:52What are you saying?
35:53Mama has laid an egg.
35:55Oh, well then.
36:00These characters would be moved frame by frame around the yard
36:05and, of course, you can see that if Oliver walked up to them and back again,
36:10his footsteps would show in the grass,
36:12so you'd see these strange ghostly footsteps around the place.
36:16The other thing, of course, is the sun would be going in and out.
36:19He'd spend hours waiting for the clouds to pass so he didn't have shadows.
36:23I never got the feeling that he was a great townsman.
36:31I think he preferred the countryside.
36:34In that way, he was part of a very important movement in children's literature
36:39that's always gone to the countryside, ever, you know,
36:43and taking its roots from Wordsworth onward.
36:47So somehow the countryside is real and good,
36:50whereas town life is artificial and has bad aspects to it.
36:56And so, you know, he'd be celebrating this whole part of the rural retreat,
37:03which has been such an important part in British imagination.
37:18What are they doing?
37:19They're fixing a piece of string on Mr. Pogel's notice board.
37:29What an odd thing to do.
37:32These are still shots for the Pogels, where Oliver used...
37:37That might be me, actually.
37:38Us, basically.
37:39The children, the Furman children, the Postgate children,
37:42and the Whites children from up the road to play the parts
37:46rather than getting in, you know, sort of proper professional children actors.
37:53That's me.
37:54That's the Fairy Queen.
37:55That's Katie Furman, and that's Matthew White.
37:59I mean, it's fun, but there were quite long periods
38:02where you felt quite bored as a little child, you know.
38:05You could stand over here with a cardboard box on your head for 25 minutes.
38:10The thing I noticed many years ago about my dad's and Peter's worlds
38:14is that they're always about family values,
38:19and they're always about sort of very simple, straightforward,
38:23quite humdrum lifestyles.
38:26But they're always put into an exciting, sort of unusual
38:31and sort of fantastic situation.
38:35So, I mean, the Clangers are a family, but they're pink creatures that live on the moon.
38:41The Pogels are a family, you know, but they're little tiny characters who live in the woods.
38:46Oh, I say. Oh, Pogel, isn't that pretty? Did you...?
38:56The Pogels seem to be playing out the everyday life of woodland folk,
38:59but it's not really quite like that.
39:01There are many kinds of strange, almost supernatural phenomena going on.
39:05The presence of witches, the presence of a kind of magic,
39:08the way in which, you know, the world suddenly can be turned upside down on a whim.
39:13Hello? What's that?
39:16Look, what on earth is it? An old boot, walking along by itself.
39:22Open up there in the name of the law.
39:28In the name of the law?
39:30There's a strong sense that these stories,
39:32they're reaching back to very deep British folkloric roots,
39:36which are quite challenging in terms of the way in which they produce characters
39:39and quite dark storytelling.
39:42Come on, open up there, Mr and Mrs Pogel.
39:45You've got things in there that don't belong to you. Open up now.
39:49It's you.
39:50I love the idea that they're living in their tree
39:53and they're having to kind of battle the forces of evil
39:59because it's quite... there's something very dark about it.
40:02They really are in jeopardy and you...
40:04and so although it's rather funny and it's, you know, beautifully done,
40:08I think the episode I watched recently was with the witch had conjured her.
40:12She was a shoe and she was come to attack them and break into their house.
40:18And, you know, so there's real jeopardy. You definitely feel a bit worried for them.
40:26There now. You might have saved me all that trouble by opening the door in the first place.
40:32You're a horrible thieving hag and you won't get anything from us, not whatever you do to us.
40:38Be silent, woman!
40:40The BBC found the witch a bit alar... which was very alarming, really.
40:44I mean, it's like a terrible nightmare, really.
40:46You try to get rid of this nasty character and she comes back as a boot or a bottle or something else
40:51and knocks at the door.
40:53Oh, it was really frightening, I think.
40:55And the BBC felt it was too frightening for the little ones.
40:58But they liked the character, so they suggested that Oliver did a series of sort of nature films
41:03with the Pogles in Pogles Wood and the witch was never seen again.
41:08And in the mud at the end of the world you shall crawl to the lasting of my spite.
41:13Children are often underestimated, in my view.
41:17They're not wanting to be fed wholly safety in their storytelling.
41:21What they want is challenge, often.
41:23And not merely challenge, but something which might affect them really quite emotionally.
41:27That's it! That's the crown! I want it!
41:30The witch character, which can come across as very brutal, very frightening,
41:33but very challenging at the same time, is about that fear that children really enjoy.
41:38They like to feel frightened sometimes, so that they can recover from that.
41:42That there can be the reassurances of the Pogles thereafter,
41:45the reassurances of the pastoral idyll.
41:47Witch!
41:48Hag of the night, dreamcreeper.
41:51Be no thing at all!
41:54Be nothing!
41:56Oi oi oi oi!
41:57She's gone then!
42:00You are the bravest and fiercest little sea horse I ever saw.
42:04And I'm sorry I took the seal without asking you.
42:07But you needn't look any further.
42:10I wish I could.
42:11Mermaids can't swim deep until they are crowned.
42:14I have to stay near the surface so that I can come up for air to breathe.
42:17Three of them, out of one hat.
42:31They're sort of froglet things, aren't they?
42:35He marked the point where he became interested in politics
42:38as the point where his father died.
42:40And I think he felt like he sort of inherited this sort of sense
42:45of having to be responsible in a larger sense, which is interesting.
42:50He told me that sort of recently before he died himself.
42:53I don't know if that was to put some sort of onus on me, you know.
42:58This was a time when some people thought there was going to be a revolution.
43:02There were minor strikes taking place.
43:04The Heath government clearly didn't know what to do
43:07in the face of all this industrial unrest and so on.
43:10And Oliver, as I seem to remember, he did some...
43:14One of the instalments of the Clangers had an outfit who turned up
43:18and said that they had to vote for froglet, I think it was.
43:21The noise? Well, that's the election campaigns of the political parties.
43:29Yes, political parties, you know, people who think a particular policy
43:33is in their own or the country's best interests.
43:36Well, they call themselves a political party.
43:39What for? Well, so they can have a cause.
43:42They can act together to defeat other political parties and get what they want.
43:46Don't you understand?
43:49Well, I wonder how I can explain.
43:50Postgate's politics were always kind of embedded in his films.
43:53They were not about over-message making.
43:56So by the time we get to the early 70s,
43:58it's quite clear that when Postgate makes vote for froglet,
44:01he's completely exasperated because he's actually feeling
44:04that he's got to make an explicit political message.
44:07Free soup for all. Yes, that should catch the votes.
44:14No soup for froglets. Dear me, you do learn fast.
44:22It's a film that's concerned with the way in which electioneering is taking place,
44:27but its bigger message, a far more important message,
44:30is his deep concern that party politics are actually undermining the idea
44:36that governments govern.
44:38And who is to give the casting vote?
44:41Mother clanger. Yes, it's time to vote.
44:46Yes, you must.
44:48I can't help that. It is your civic duty to vote.
44:53Unless people collaborated, cared for each other,
44:56and cared for the country,
44:58then we were going to go into great industrial decline.
45:01In fact, on their own, people can be as loving and generous and tolerant as clangers.
45:05But political parties can't.
45:07I mean, anything like that is just weakness in a political party.
45:11I mean, listen, who ever heard of political generosity?
45:14It's a complete contradiction.
45:16Party politics is a question of power.
45:19And, hey, are you listening to me?
45:22No.
45:24You're listening to me?
45:26Yours is the right to put your trust on the ballot plate,
45:29and on everybody else...
45:31Bagpuss, of course, acknowledged as the greatest children's programme of all time in a recent
45:49poll, but it's a very nostalgic, backward-looking idea that sets itself up in relation, obviously,
45:57to a child's imagination and the way that a child imagines the actions of a saggy old cloth
46:03cat, Bagpuss.
46:05Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Emily.
46:22That's my old bedroom. That's looking out. Look at the mould in my old bedroom.
46:27Oh, that's the gate.
46:28Were you seven when we did this, or was it...?
46:30Well, that's what I've always been led to believe, that I was seven.
46:36Because of these photographs, people often think, I'm going to be in my 80s, and they're
46:41very disappointed that they haven't got a cuddly granny to come and talk to, so it is quite
46:48strange.
46:49Oliver took loads and loads of photographs, and when he chose the right photograph, and
46:53he'd mark this up with a China graph, and that would be the one which would be used for
46:59the film. Then the photographer would go away and make a vignetted copy of that photograph.
47:06And she had a shop.
47:08There it is.
47:13He was pretty much around all the time, really. I mean, he was here when we got back from
47:18school, and it was a regular thing, taking him a cup of tea at half past three, half past
47:23three, four o'clock. And you'd hear all these strange noises coming from the studio.
47:29Bagpuss lives in the box nowadays. Come on out then. Come on in. There you are. You haven't
47:37moved since I last saw you. Must be a reason for that. There he is. Oh. Here I made him.
47:50Well, yes, he wakes up and usually yawns, doesn't he?
47:53And when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up, too. The mice on the mouse organ
48:02woke up and stretched.
48:04Yes, it was strange because I did drawings of this cat. This is a marmalade cat. But
48:11before I had to get the material made because I just could not find a stripe the right sort
48:15of thickness. So we got this company that would make me some stripe material. When the
48:21man finally came along, he said, I'm afraid we had a slight mistake in the kiln. Something
48:28went wrong and it turned out and he brought out this great piece of pink and cream material
48:33instead of marmalade coloured. And I looked at it and I was a bit taken aback for a while
48:39and then thought, well, that's unusual. I've never really thought of that. And it was a total,
48:45a beautiful accident, really, because he is famous as the pink striped cat.
48:49What a pretty story. What a delightful story. Oof. Absolute rubbish, every word of it, but
48:57quite delightful. And you, Bagpuss?
49:01The interesting thing about Bagpuss is there's an interesting analogy with that, which is
49:05that it's an idea of comparing Bagpuss and everybody in Bagpuss as being in the pub. It's
49:13a bit like that, because you've got Yaffle, who's the bloke at the bar, who knows everything
49:20about everything.
49:21It's not only sad, it is silly. It's not only silly, it is not true. It is all nonsense.
49:29And you've got Madelaine, who's the good time girl who likes to have a bit of a laugh and
49:33a sing song.
49:35I'm just Madelaine, a doll made of scraps. You'll find me in a cupboard or a box, perhaps.
49:43And then you've got Bagpuss who tells the stories. If you buy him a pint, he'll tell you a story.
49:48So there's a wonderful sort of analogy with Bagpuss being a sort of like a pub situation, really.
49:54Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. This is getting very silly. Too silly. I would not have anything
50:01more to do with you until you are properly serious.
50:04Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.
50:05Come on, mice. There's a roll of music somewhere.
50:08Heave, heave, heave. The marvellous mechanical mouse organ.
50:17We'd always had Vernon Elliot writing the music for things like the Clangers and Ivor
50:23the Engine and that sort of thing. But we felt with the new series, which this set slightly
50:30in past times and rather nostalgic, we should have a different sort of music.
50:36The bony king of nowhere, he sat upon his throne. He didn't much like sitting there because
50:46his throne was, his throne was made of stone.
50:52And Oliver found Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, who were two musicians who played, they could
50:57play almost any instrument, played folk music.
50:59This throne was made of marble white. The feet were made of gold. It was a royal throne,
51:06a rite. But oh dear it was. It was extremely cold. This boy...
51:14Oh, I think it was clear that he really loved music. I don't think he particularly had had
51:20much to do with the kind of music we played, which was for the most part traditional English,
51:24Irish and Scots dance music or traditional song. I don't think he'd had a great deal of
51:30experience of it, but he certainly loved it. I'm sure, well I know, that there was much more
51:36music in the film than he'd at first intended.
51:43I really don't know why Miss Emily brings us things like this.
51:48So we can mend them of course, clean them and restore them into the beautiful things they once were.
51:53Yep, yep, that's all very well.
51:55The whole ethos of Bagpuss, which is about using things in a different way or finding broken things
52:02and mending them and investing them then with a magical kind of property.
52:08I think that was way ahead of its time and frankly I think it was way ahead of us too.
52:13I mean John Faulkner and I were very politically conscious young people,
52:17but our politics only extended as far as where we were going to build the barricades.
52:21We will lace it, we will graze it, we will glitter it prettily pink, we will gunge it.
52:27This much deeper ecological environmentalist kind of approach that Oliver had has only grown on me over the years
52:35and I've seen how far sighted and ahead of its time it was.
52:39You better now, don't you think? That is better now, don't you think?
52:43Oh yes, that is much better. Much, much better. Look at...
52:48I've sat and watched Bagpuss with children and sometimes they've clocked it and liked it.
52:54I've also sat with them sometimes, say my present four-year-old and he didn't like it.
53:00He didn't like Bagpuss's face, he couldn't read it I don't think and he didn't like it.
53:05And I know that one feeling I had when I was a child and that I didn't like was a form of melancholy.
53:17I didn't like poetry that had a sort of unattached melancholy.
53:21I just wonder whether sometimes with Bagpuss some children find the sort of sad edge to it.
53:27Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old saggy cloth cat. Baggy and a bit loose at the seams.
53:36In my big tin box here, there's a Tyrolean hat. Oh yeah, here you are.
53:42And there's a... he's got his... Oh no, that's genuine. That wasn't the thinking cap.
53:48That was an accolade for his academic distinction.
53:52And this was his sailor's thinking cap. Oh, that's right.
53:55Which I like, that's one I like best. That's the best one, yes.
53:58When he told the story of the ship in the bottle.
54:01When you come to think of it, a doll is a very anxious, even dangerous thing to be.
54:24You see, dolls cannot choose. Dolls can only be chosen.
54:31Television, of course, was changing.
54:33Children's programming has always had to be responsive, of course,
54:36to the commissioner's understanding of what children are like now.
54:40What's happening on the streets? You know, what's happening with children?
54:43What sort of programming would appeal to them?
54:46Do we go with the American model, the Sesame Street model,
54:48and all the kinds of programming that was beginning to follow through?
54:51Or do we go with our traditional British models of stop-motion animation,
54:56the Postgate-Furman tradition, and so forth?
54:59Apple, that's you. Who?
55:02Inevitably, some of the kind of wistfulness, the melancholia, the gentleness,
55:06the innocence of Postgate and Furman's worlds
55:08were not going to sit necessarily with the assumed to be more cynical children
55:13of the late 70s and early 80s.
55:15Postgate's worlds, really, at that point, seemed to be something
55:18that were not alternative enough.
55:21Though, of course, to look at them, you would never know
55:23they were feeling anything at all.
55:26But that's how it is with dolls.
55:37Huh? What? That's not the end of the story. What happened next?
55:41He wasn't somebody who was going to take up beekeeping or stamp collecting.
55:50He dedicated himself to sort of dealing with the problems
55:53that he thought were extremely important,
55:56such as the nuclear problem
55:58and the environmental problem, particularly, you know.
56:02He found it a very sort of trying and depressing and difficult thing to do.
56:09But he felt it was very, very necessary.
56:11And he felt like he had to do it
56:13because other people were fooling themselves
56:16and weren't really paying proper attention.
56:19And I think, in some respects, it sort of, it came from,
56:24coming from such a strong political background
56:26with his grandfather and his father and sort of,
56:30and he felt obliged to be part of that world as well, really.
56:35Yes, I dare say, but whatever sort of story it is,
56:39you haven't finished it yet.
56:41Hello!
56:42Hello!
56:45The true inheritors of Oliver Postgate
56:47are probably the Teletubbies, the Fimbles and In the Night Garden
56:51because, if you think about them,
56:52these are strange, woolly creatures living in a world
56:55that you're not quite sure where they are.
56:56In fact, Oliver thought his interpretation of the Teletubbies
56:59was that it was a post-nuclear world
57:02and these were mutated human beings
57:04with, like, aerials stuck out of their head
57:05and, like, kind of movies going on in their stomachs.
57:08I mean, he thought it was utterly weird,
57:09which is quite funny, isn't it, coming from Oliver.
57:12Certainly from my own point of view,
57:16whenever I'm working on a new programme,
57:19and this is true of Teletubbies or In the Night Garden,
57:22then I always sit down with, especially the Clangers,
57:26but the Postgate legacy, if you like, and watch them.
57:31Not to, you know, plunder them for ideas,
57:35but just to make that connection with the child that I once was
57:38because it's through watching them again
57:41that you really see what was important to you.
57:44I'll never be with you, please.
57:49Yes, it's nice to have visitors,
57:51but sometimes it's even nicer to see them go.
57:55The very fact that they are so resilient in the culture,
58:07everybody remembers them,
58:08everybody has them as some sort of cultural touchstone,
58:12that itself is proof of the value of the work.
58:16And that's quite enough from you, I wore the engine.
58:28Bagpuss gave a big yawn and settled down to sleep.
58:32From recent encounters to more memorable moments from the archives,
58:50famous faces in conversation, choosing their desert island discs.
58:54Listen now on BBC Sounds.
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