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