FAREWELL OLIVER POSTGATE
The death of Oliver Postgate on Monday is a great loss, his films like Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss and the Clangers were defining experiences for a generation.
It is hard to remember now, what watching television was like before video recorders, let alone the wonders of the internet. Back then, if you missed a programme you had missed it, and so serial films would have an extra mystery for a child. We were rarely in control of our lives enough to ensure that we saw every episode, so you would just snatch segments of the story. They tended to be shown every school holiday, and so we also saw the episodes out of the correct order. Somehow this gave them a greater grandeur and almost mythological status as if we were peering up at something we couldn’t quite see. The fact that many of the stories were then rewritten and substantially altered when they were remade in colour overwrote our younger memories, but they stay in the background as ghosts of childhood past
Oliver Postgate’s work was extremely innovative and also had a decidedly leftist slant to it. Firstly, he addressed a range of emotions in children – he recognised that being a child makes you out of control and vulnerable a lot of the time, and children can be sad and lonely. What he understood brilliantly is that children are self-aware of the transient nature of their own childhood. If you compare Ivor the Engine with Thomas the Tank Engine, you can see how much more complex Ivor was, he was melancholic, and also moved by the beauty of music. The world of Ivor was also full of the secret dignity of working class community, charged with small victories and solidarity.
The remake of the last episode (”the retirement” - see above) was filmed at the high tide of Thatcherism, and it is hard not to read the burial of the dragons to save money as resonant of those unhappy times. Ivor’s world was also under siege from modernity. The dragons finally buried themselves in the mountain when no more half crown coins could feed the gas meter to keep them warm. But we know they are still there.
Noggin the Nog was a Norse king, who lived in world surrounded by magic. The great thing about Noggin was his mundanity – this was no story of great heroes and warriors, but of domesticity and kindliness. He was a Viking king who we would find digging potatoes in the castle garden. And we needed it, you have to remember the world we lived in then. We were surrounded by the echoes of war, and every week we got comics like “the Victor”, that were full of tales of heroism from the second world war. When I grew up there were still bombs sites unrepaired, our fathers and grandfathers had all been soldiers, and our parents had friends who had been widowed, or whose health had been destroyed. Every single day we played war in the school playground, and when I was a child every one of my friends had the ambition of being a soldier.
Oliver Postgate was certainly not interested in military derring do. He had been a conscientious objector in the second world war, influenced by personal eccentricity and having met anarchists at art college. In his 1999 autobiography “Seeing Things” he describes how the Army was totally unprepared for conscientious objection. When conscripted he reported for duty, one day late, as advised by Quakers, and declared that he would not be prepared to serve. Quite amusingly this was regarded by the army as an administrative inconvenience rather than a political challenge. He was treated politely and humanely, and after three months in prison was released with no further obligations. This left him with the difficult job of fitting into a militarised society as a civilian, which he did by becoming an agricultural worker and part time inventor.
He was almost impervious to the social expectations that surrounded him. In 1957 he wed an older woman with children, who he had started seeing when she was still married; at a time when this was considered quite scandalous.
Postgate was not really an overtly political man, but he came from the left intelligentsia. His father, Raymond Postgate, had been one of the most significant intellectuals to join the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain, and Oliver’s uncle was the theorist of guild socialism GDH Cole. His mother, Daisy Lansbury, was the daughter of George Lansbury, although I am unaware of Daisy having been active in politics herself.
Oliver Postgate’s only significant foray into political activism was in the 1970s and 1980s when he became a tireless campaigner for nuclear disarmament, and he developed a convincing argument that NATO were illogical and insincere in their protestations that they would only use nuclear weapons in retaliation to a Russian attack. In fact, as he convincingly demonstrated in his pamphlet “the Emperor’s New Clothes”, the British government’s own documents admitted that NATO was prepared to make a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. His contribution was important because his arguments reached many who were unmoved by the more orthodox arguments from the traditional left and pacifists, he was able to use his status to appear on BBC Radio 4′ Woman’s Hour to speak against nuclear weapons, when conventional politicians could not have accessed that audience.
His lasting legacy is that he irrevocably changed the course of children’s television and literature , and certainly for the better.
Don’t forget the Bagpuss episode where the mice go on strike, chanting, “Mice not sing, mice not work. Mice strike!”. In these turbulent times, the mice must rise again.
Comment by OnTheSquare — 9 December, 2008 @ 1:26 pm
I grew up in Major’s Britain but I remember Ivor the engine, strong Welsh accents, watercolours and dreamy two-dimensional landscapes.
I remember finding it utterly bizarre and yet very relaxing. Nice to look back on childhood animation.
Comment by Futurecast — 9 December, 2008 @ 1:55 pm
Didn’t one of the great chants from Bagpuss approximately re-emerge as the lead slogan of the O’Bama campaign?
Comment by Dr Paul — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:03 pm
Dr Paul - I think you’re getting confused with Bob The Builder’s line ‘Can we fix it? Yes we can’
I also remember the strike episode, and thinking it was brilliant. They managed to get away with lots of stuff in the programmes.
Comment by Dan — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:11 pm
Firmin and Postgate’s animations were formative in my and I’m sure many others childhood.
Charming and humane stories, unlike many more recent kids programmes, which are no more than long adverts for plastic toys.
Comment by Green Socialist — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
The more contempory childrens’ TV prog that I find quite reminiscent of Postgate is Titch:
sadly no one seems to have put this on you tube (well only in Spanish, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UIjUc6wSH_I)
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 December, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
I met a CBeebies producer recently and asked when there was going to be more Noggin the Nog. She said she had asked him at some point, his reply was “Fuck off, I’m busy”. She did say his estate had been sold recently, so there is possible that any of his work will be remade, though obviously it would be a surprise if it was done with the same independence of spirit.
Comment by skidmarx — 9 December, 2008 @ 3:00 pm
#7 It has to be said, that he does come over as not a very personable chap in his autobiography, so this does sound plausible.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 December, 2008 @ 3:04 pm
Riots in Greece, cholera outbreak in zimbabwe, deepening economic crisis at home and abroad and you’re all talking about childrens fucking cartoons. No wonder the left is seen by most people as irrelevant if this what the left sees fit to focus on in the midst of all that is happening.
Comment by paul c — 9 December, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
oh, i’ll bring out my sackcloth and ashes!
Comment by Green Socialist — 9 December, 2008 @ 3:19 pm
Certainly Bagpuss influenced me to learn the banjo.
Also the slow and leisurely pace of older childrens TV is refreshing with so much today being hyper-fast and in-your-face with little appeal to the imagination and intellect.
For a superb marxist analysis of fairy stories and folk tales check out Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell.
Comment by Adamski — 9 December, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
Lighten up, Paul C.
To paraphrase that kids show from my youth that I never watched, ‘why don’t you just get out the comments box and go and be a miserable arse somewhere else?’
If you build the barricade, the people will come.
Cheers for the post, Andy. I’m currently building up a library of Bod, Mr Benn, Bagpuss, Morph and the Mr Men for my son. I agree with Adamski’s point about the leisurely pace and calmness of such older programmes.
Comment by Darren — 9 December, 2008 @ 5:47 pm
Actually paulc, the surest way for the left to demonstrate it WAS irrelevant would be NOT to discuss the loss of someone who shaped the thinking and imagination of generations of workers so positively.
Comment by Paulm — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
In general I agree with what people are saying here. Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine certainly were excellent, but we shouldn’t project from that to saying that modern childrens tv is rubbish. In my opinion tv today, especially childrens tv in britain is the best it has ever been, not only that but it is consistently so, meeting the very different demands of modern scheduling etc, for younger children just on cbeebies there are half a dozen superb programmes -charlie and lola, pablo, 64 zoo lane were my favourites when I had younger children, but the big name programmes, tweenies, teletubbies, balamory are sophisticated pieces of work.
Onto CBBC and again there is some of the what people here deride as fast-paced rubbish, but some of the cartoons are actually quite clever, I think there is one called “Watch my chops” (I can’t look on the CBBC site because it is filled with annoying sound effects and animation which make navigation impossible) and there’s a couple of australian comedy dramas which are pretty good, and that’s before you even get started on big name programmes like Tracy Beaker et al.
To try to compare Postgate’s programmes with modern tv is a hopeless task, Bagpuss is charming and still enjoyable but it’s hard to say it is better than modern childrens tv.
Comment by martin ohr — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
Okay so I’m a bit younger than most people commenting so I wasn’t bought up watching these cartoons so I don’t really feel any loss and yes maybe I’m a bit impatient. But really this post could have waited for another, slower, news day. I just feel that with everything thats happening today we should be focused on the issues that are affecting working class people at home and abroad. And I’m sorry to say no matter how good he was the death of a cartoonist isn’t one of them. I just think blogs like this one and others are a good way of the people sharing and exchanging views this post just seemed a little distracting. Glad to see that a post about the events in Greece has finally gone up.
Comment by Paul C — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:34 pm
” But really this post could have waited for another, slower, news day”
NO because it is an obituary, so you have to write it when the bloke actually died.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
Paul c
” just think blogs like this one and others are a good way of the people sharing and exchanging views this post just seemed a little distracting. Glad to see that a post about the events in Greece has finally gone up.”
Why don’t you set up your own blog, instead of telling us how we could run this one better?
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
#14 “we shouldn’t project from that to saying that modern childrens tv is rubbish. In my opinion tv today, especially childrens tv in britain is the best it has ever been”
I think Martin is correct here, there is a lot of tremendously good children’s TV made in Britain at the moment, and over the last few years.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 December, 2008 @ 11:46 pm
Some of the best kids’ TV works on two levels - it entertains the children but also has messages for adults. My favourite Postgate series, The Clangers, contained implicit critiques of consumerism and the space race, amongst other things, that went completely over my head when I was seven, but amused me greatly when I watched them on video a just a few years back. Great stuff.
Comment by Francis King — 10 December, 2008 @ 12:37 am
Thanks for an interesting obit. One point - he did continue his political activism in his later years through his website www.oliverpostgate.co.uk which expounds on a range of issues including the Iraq war, Trident and the environment. On the latter issue, he was also sufficiently incensed by the overly-cautious nature of the Stern report to publish full page denunciations of it in various national newspapers.
Comment by Adrian Cruden — 10 December, 2008 @ 1:43 am
And what kind of socialism is it, paul c, that says we must not mourn our dead?
Thanks Andy, for a kind and thoughtful remembrance.
Comment by harry b — 10 December, 2008 @ 4:41 am
Thanks for this. I grew up in the countryside near Canterbury, where Postgate and his collaborator Peter Firmin were well-known and (mostly) well-liked. It was Postgate who told my brother to “bugger off, you little prick” after he turned a corner on his bike in Blean Wood and accidentally knocked the head off one of the Pogles during filming (we only heard about it later when my brother asked our dad what a prick was). It was Firmin who gave a talk at our school and explained that he’d occasionally removed some of the more overt pacifist and pro-union lines from Postgate’s scripts, knowing that if he didn’t the BBC management would. But a lot got through anyway.
Comment by Poglefreak — 10 December, 2008 @ 7:33 am
I loved all of Oliver Postgate’s work as I was growing up. And my children enjoyed it all on video. He and Peter Firmin still surpass most if not all of the new animators in this digital age. He worked in a time when the BBC was not afraid to do something different and his work nurtured the imagination of thousands upon thousands of children.
He will be missed.
Listening to the radio yesterday when the BBC paid tribute to him I was shocked that little was said about the man himself, his political beliefs, his pacifism. Thanks for this article.
Jackie
Comment by jackie — 10 December, 2008 @ 7:50 am
#22 Poglefreak…. Pogles Wood was a the centre of my earliest childhood memories… Edna and Amos Pogle, Pippin [their adopted child who was really a ‘changeling’ offspring of the ‘King of the Faries’] Plant, Hedgepig…. and the scary Witch…. [I never encountered such a rich caste of characters till I joined the International Marxist Group 14 years later.]
I think it is typical of Andy Newman’s ’stalinist’ rewriting of History to ‘airbrush’ out of his obituary of Oliver Postgate the clearly ‘wide eyed trot’ Pippin and indeed the whole Pogles Wood period.
Comment by mark anthony france — 10 December, 2008 @ 9:50 am
Stalinist were pretty good at Kids TV though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singing_Ringing_Tree
Comment by Green Socialist — 10 December, 2008 @ 10:05 am
#9
“Riots in Greece, cholera outbreak in zimbabwe, deepening economic crisis at home and abroad and you’re all talking about childrens fucking cartoons. No wonder the left is seen by most people as irrelevant if this what the left sees fit to focus on in the midst of all that is happening.”
Well, Paul C, good to see you totally full throttle with finger on the political pulse. BUT don’t you get ground down with all the oppressive crap that gets flung at people day in and day out? Also, don’t you want a distraction now and then? Plus socialists should be able to discuss anything, there aren’t any barriers and as socialists we have a duty to look at every aspect of society and that includes kids telly and how that has changed. People like Postgate did have a massive influence of children’s telly and on the kids themselves growing up. I liked Bagpuss….I admit I have a BBC video of a couple of episodes about the ’saggy old cloth cat but Emily loved him’ (and yeah, what ever happened to Emily?). It is kinda whimical but these phenomena do impact and condition us.
Plus I also have a couple of Bagpusses that I am thinking of turning into a bit of conceptual art installation maybe suspended from my ceiling, not sure still thinking through the process. Could be a Turner Prize winner….. Contemporary popular culture conceptualised.
Comment by Louise — 10 December, 2008 @ 10:52 am
#14 Martin: “Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine certainly were excellent, but we shouldn’t project from that to saying that modern childrens tv is rubbish. In my opinion tv today, especially childrens tv in britain is the best it has ever been”
I completely agree that CBeebies is excellent and does a great job. But when you get on the commercial & cable channels it’s a bloody nightmare. Channel 5 Milkshake’s programmes are OK but the hardsell and brainwashing in the lengthy breaks for adverts are too much to take. And the channels that put out mostly Anerican output are really quite frightening - every programme seems to be focused on making kids obsessed with insecurity & the threat of “the other”. Sesame Street or Tom & Jerry it is not. It makes you realise what a horrifically fucked up psychiatry has ruled Hollywood & mainstream America for the last 28 years (or wherever it is the TV comes from).
This is a poliical issue for the left, because every time you get a BBC scandal such as J Ross/R Brand, media interests like Murdoch pile in to get the BBC abolished or emasculated, so that they can establish their monopoly.
I would like to see the campaign to have adverts banned from childrens TV stepped up. I would also like somebody to plan a massive spontaneous party which we can have for the happy day when we get the news that Rupert Murdoch is dead.
Comment by Strategist — 10 December, 2008 @ 11:09 am
#27
“Channel 5 Milkshake’s programmes are OK but the hardsell and brainwashing in the lengthy breaks for adverts are too much to take.”
I know this is for the teenage market but I find T4 (weekend Channel 4 late morning/early afternoon fare for teenagers onwards)really utterly irritating. Maybe I am showing my age but the presenters aren’t entertaining, funny, off-the-wall, or anarchic instead derivative and ….boring. It doesn’t have a conherent theme just one big mish mash of so-called entertainment interpersed with America tv (c’mon, how many times can you watch a repeat of Friends). The only reason I endure some of it (*cough* um embarrassment…) is when I am watching…*cough*..um…the Hollyoaks omnibus and later on The Simpsons.
Ahh, Hollyoaks, the fictional town that has border guards to keep out the ugly and plain looking people.
Comment by Louise — 10 December, 2008 @ 11:33 am
#27 “And the channels that put out mostly Anerican output are really quite frightening - every programme seems to be focused on making kids obsessed with insecurity & the threat of “the other”
True, Cartoon Network is particularly awful.
But not all the good TV comes from Britain, Lazy Town is imported from Iceland (probably the whole economy relies upon it now), and some of the US programmes are also good, for younger children rugrats is brilliant, and I also like the new animated Batman for older sprogs.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 December, 2008 @ 11:36 am
Very sad news. Noggin the Nog was the bright spot in the long dark teatime of my childhood. Fortunately all the Noggin episodes are available now on DVD from The Dragon’s Friendly Society: http://www.dragons-friendly-society.co.uk/
Comment by Olaf The Lofty — 10 December, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
#29 “not all the good TV comes from Britain, Lazy Town is imported from Iceland”
I agree with that. Much as I liked Ivor the Engine as a kid, I’m glad we got that diet livened up a bit with American stuff the likes of Scooby Doo and Top Cat (or Boss Cat as it absurdly had to be known in UK, to avoid inadvertently promoting a brand of tinned cat food). Similarly today The Simpsons. The Americans produce both the best and the worst film & TV in the world. It’s just when they slip so far below where they could be that I get disappointed.
Not to worry, In Obama We Trust.
Comment by Strategist — 10 December, 2008 @ 12:25 pm
The Shamen once produced an album called “In Gorbachev We Trust”. Not many people know that. Actually it was quite good…
Comment by Olaf The Lofty — 10 December, 2008 @ 12:43 pm
#26 Louise: “I liked Bagpuss….I admit I have a BBC video of a couple of episodes about the ’saggy old cloth cat but Emily loved him’ (and yeah, what ever happened to Emily?)”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7773124.stm
Comment by Strategist — 10 December, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
You say you are “unaware of Daisy having been active in politics herself”. I can confirm that Daisy Lansbury was herself a socialist and feminist activist. She was a member of Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes. Once famously dressing up as Pankhurst in 1913 to allow Sylvia to escape a police raid under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. She was a worker at the Labour Research Department and member of both Pankhurst’s Workers Socialist Federation and the short-lived Communist Party (British Section of the Third International), the later was formed in a flat shared by Daisy. She along with her journalist husband Raymond Postgate joined the unified CPGB; however I am unsure if she left with him in 1922.
Comment by AA — 10 December, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
Returning to Oliver Postgate for a while, I always thought the “Clangers” was the best series.
An existential parable set on a stripped-down planetismal, where clangers were a troglodyte proletariat and the Soup Dragon symbolised a form of rickety welfare state and the. Every so often the inhabitants would be threatened by something off-planet disrupting their eco-system and fragile economy.
Or something like that.
Also like the fact Postgate lived in Blean. Definitely a stimulus to the imagination. You can free-wheel all the way to Whitstable through Blean Woods down a country road through Chestnut coppice, which are carpteted by bluebells in May.
As I recall, Blean Woods was close to where one of the armed uprisings on English soil was fought in the 19th century, a murky episode involving the self-styled ‘Sir William Courtenay’. Although he was slightly bonkers, he managed to attract quite a number of local agricultural labourers and there was a battle with the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment on 31st May 1838 in which there were casualties on both sides.
just checked it and there’s more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bossenden_Wood
Comment by prianikoff — 11 December, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
BAgpus swas meant to have Marxist undertones to it - Bagpuss was Karl Marx and Professor Yackle was Trotsky and the Rag doll was the female who brought sense to it all. The mice were the workers - they sang “we will fix it, we will mend it, we will make it nice and new”, Bagpuss’ shop advocated recycling and working in co-operation with one another.
I loved Bagpuss and I also loved Ivor the engine - you can’t say that without a Welsh Valley’s accent.
Comment by cat — 14 December, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Or
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/comment-postgate-bagpuss-television
Comment by cat — 14 December, 2008 @ 1:06 pm
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Comment by kayemilano — 3 June, 2010 @ 7:23 pm
I’m sick of seeing Emma Bunton plugging her ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ show on Channel 5. The adverts for it are so over the top, that you try not to vomit. I only watch Channel 5 when i’m watching ‘Neighbours’, as it used to be on BBC1. If you want narcissism or wit, then hire ME. I’d give those dried-up tv hosts some competition to worry about. Maybe T4 could have Ricky Gervais present. At least HE’D give us laughs. The recent T4 hosts talk like they’re robots. AND they need to stop with those annoying ‘Friends’ and ‘The Simpson’s’ repeats, on loop. THEN they even go and big-up their own tv show, when actually there’s nothing to give it much credit. How are repeats on a loop meant to save a tv show that isn’t doing itself much justice? Isn’t it better to just axe it? As it’s quite clearly dying of it’s own embarrassment. Have it replaced with something that shows the producers actually give a damn.
Comment by Sarah Jane — 18 August, 2010 @ 5:15 pm