Monthly Archives: January 2023

Film, TV, and Theatre

Oliver Postgate’s Noggin The Nog (1959)

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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…

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin
Literature

P G Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

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PG (Sir Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse (1881–1975) was an English author who was one of the most widely read humourists of the 20th century. A prolific writer throughout his life, Wodehouse published more than ninety books and would often have two or more books on the go at any one time. His prose style and subject matter was light and breezy and, in his own words, he wanted to spread “sweetness and light”. Just look at those titles: Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning. With every sparkling joke, every gently innocent character, and every farcical tussle, all set in an idealised world of the 1920s and 30s, Wodehouse whisks us far away from our worries.

He had many fans among the great and the good, including former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh; I seem to remember reading that Lemmy of Motorhead used to read him on his tour bus, post-gig! Although Wodehouse wrote several series of books about various characters such as the Blandings Castle set, the unrufflable monocle-wearing Old Etonian Psmith (with a silent P), and the tall-tale-telling Mr Mulliner, most people will know him for the comic creations, Jeeves and Wooster.

Bertie Wooster is the moneyed young toff who cares little about anything other than fashionable socks, frippery, and tophole societal high jinks, whilst Jeeves is the sagacious valet who clearly has the brains that Bertie lacks and who steers his master through many a social storm. The Jeeves canon consists of 35 short stories and 11 novels, and a wonderful starting point is 1925’s collection of ten short stories, Carry On, Jeeves.

My own introduction to Wodehouse, like many people, was the 1990s TV series Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. Jeeves and Wooster was a weekly escape into a jazz-age wonderland of art-deco apartments, panelled gentlemen’s clubs, “tissue-restoring” cocktails and buffet breakfasts, all serving as a backdrop to a series of predicaments for Bertie from which he would invariably be extricated by Jeeves. The drama was always held together by fizzing dialogue, peppered with bons mots and not a few neologisms from Wodehouse’s pen.

As befitting a man whose characters and situations had such lightness of being, Wodehouse didn’t take himself too seriously either, as this rejoinder to a critic below shows:

“A certain critic – for such men, I regret to say, do exist – made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’…he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

Here’s a typical scene from the TV series wherein Bertie finds himself embroiled in a secret love triangle in high danger of imminent exposure and it’s down to Jeeves to pull off a suitably clever rescue.

P G Wodehouse