Persons of a certain age (and perhaps persons of any age, given the enduring popularity of his creations) will remember with affection the voice of animator and puppeteer Oliver Postgate (1925–2008). He was the creator, writer and narrator of such popular and charming children’s TV programmes as Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Pogles’ Wood. All these shows were made by Smallfilms, the company he set up in 1959 with collaborator, artist and puppet maker Peter Firmin, in a disused cowshed near Peter’s home in Blean near Canterbury.
They were a great team: Postgate came up with the concepts, wrote the scripts and did the stop motion filming whilst Firmin did the artwork and built the models. As Postgate voiced so many of the productions, his distinctive voice became familiar to generations of children. Smallfilms was able to produce two minutes of TV-ready film per day, which was many times more than a conventional stop motion animation studio of the time, with Postgate moving the (originally cardboard) characters himself, and working his 16mm camera frame-by-frame with a home-made clicker.
They began in 1959 with Ivor the Engine, a series for ITV about a Welsh steam locomotive who wanted to sing in a choir, and followed it up, also in 1959, with Noggin the Nog, their first production for the BBC. These two programmes established Smallfilms as a safe pair of hands to produce children’s entertainment and they went on to produce material for the BBC right up to the 1980s. Everyone will have their favourite (in a 1999 BBC poll Bagpuss was voted the most popular children’s TV programme of all time) and for me it was Noggin the Nog.
The stories were based around the central character of Noggin, the good-natured son of Knut, King of the Nogs, and his queen Grunhilda. When King Knut dies, Noggin meets and marries Princess Nooka of the Nooks, and becomes the new king, at the expense of arch-villain Nogbad the Bad, who is forever trying to claim Noggin’s throne for himself. Other characters included lazy Captain of the Royal Guard Thornogson, eccentric inventor Olaf the Lofty, and Graculus, a big green bird. The names and themes are very Scandinavian and saga-tinged and Postgate must have been very familiar with the Nordic folkloric tales of old such as the Icelandic Eddas, but of course it’s children’s TV so it’s all just wonderfully made-up fun.
The pair brought in composer Vernon Elliott to create atmospheric musical sketches for the programmes and he did so with great effect using the bassoon, harp, glockenspiel and, in the case of the Clangers’ distinctive voices, the swanee whistle. Speaking of Clangers, Firmin once said that the show’s surrealism had led to accusations that Postgate was taking hallucinogenic drugs: “People used to say, ‘Ooh, what’s Oliver on, with all of these weird ideas?’ And we used to say, ‘He’s on cups of tea and biscuits'”. So very British!
Enjoy this nostalgic selection of opening segments from Noggin the Nog, Clangers, and that “saggy, old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”, Bagpuss…
