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…