Oliver Postgate passes away

Tue, Dec 9, 2008

The BBC and numerous other news sources are reporting the sad news of the death of Oliver Postgate at the age of 83. Many of our readers abroad may not know the name, but I strongly suspect the news has hit the hearts of millions here in Britain for the simple reason that Postgate, along with his Smallfilms partner Peter Firmin, is directly responsible for decades of happy, childhood memories through their delightful, eccentric, imaginative and enchanting animations which have graced screens since the 1950s. Noggin the Nog, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, the Clangers – all fairly simple animations (in the best tradition of British eccentrics he and Firmin shot their films frame by frame in a converted cow shed using a hand-made ‘clicker’ to advance the frames on the camera) and yet effective, with Postgate supplying voices and sound effects. In the dimly remembered days before multi-channel TV, the web and digital animation it was enough for legions of children and Smallfilms’ short but charming animations, moving from elementary cutout card to puppets, were as essential to the British schoolkid as a copy of the Beano.

(Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin with Bagpuss, pic borrowed from the BBC)

“We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we’d made, and they would say, ‘Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next?’ We would tell them, and they would say, ‘That sounds fine, we’ll mark it in for eighteen months from now’, and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance, and we’d just go away and do it,” Oliver Postgate quoted on the BBC site.

Peter Firmin Oliver Postgate the Clangers.jpg

(the wonderfully bonkers Clangers, voiced using Swannee whistles, which still didn’t stop Oliver getting into trouble once when a BBC exec worked out the high pitched whistling was saying “the bloody thing won’t open!”; (c) Smallfilms)

Firmin and Postgate managed that perfect balance, like the best writers of children’s fiction, between offering children a delightfully imaginative (and sometimes surreal, like the Clangers) little realm for young minds to enjoy coupled with the type of gentle reassurance you associate with the voice and presence of a dear uncle. A few years ago Postgate and Firmin’s Bagpuss was voted the best children’s series of all time. Of course the warm, rosy glow of nostalgia plays a part in how most of us will view those animations and Postgate himself (by all reports a very gentle man, a conscientious objector during the Second World War and an active campaigner for nuclear disarmament). Being honest there’s almost no way most of us could look at the work objectively, it will forever be filtered through that special lens of half-remembered childhood memories, but I don’t see anything wrong with that – its part of their magic and its a magic that continues as the children who grew up with these shows buy them on DVD to show to their children in turn and girls who weren’t even born when the series aired can be seen sporting a Bagpuss rucksack. The cuddly old moggy himself, it was announced only a few weeks ago, is being setup for a return to the screens of children’s TV next year, although it won’t be the same.

It’s sad – it’s a little, golden piece of our collective childhood, that half remembered, half imagined memory when summers were always sunny and winters always full of snow and sledges, gone away. Except we still have the memories and those, lovely, hand-made, charming, eccentric and very, very British animated shows. He made children happy – what a simple and wonderful quality to be remembered for.