Oliver Postgate

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If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you're a listener of a certain age, there's a good chance that this will take you back. Once upon a time. Not so long ago. There was a little girl, and her name was Emily. That's the warm, comforting voice of Oliver Postgate, our subject today. Postgate's soothing narration accompanied many children's television shows between nineteen fifty eight and nineteen seventy two, beginning with Either the Engine and ending with The Clangers.

But he was not only the voice, he was also the writer and animator of these programmes. The most beautiful. The most magical The most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world was, of course, Bagpus, which is regularly voted the best children's TV programme of all time. And it's from the world of children's television that our guest comes too.

Andrew Davenport, the writer and musical mind behind In the Night Garden and Moon and Me, and the co creator of the double BAFTA winning Telly Tubbies. Andrew eh ooh Uh oh Wha what is it about Postgate, Oliver Postgate? Uh well there's nobody else that I can think of whose work has so profoundly inspired me uh from my earliest childhood right up to my adult professional life.

um his stories, his characters, the worlds, uh the the beautiful language he uses, uh and of course the famously homespun and accessible manner of the productions as well. Um but also the values, the principles, the utter kindness of the work. Um and I feel all of that stays with me and remains a constant resource. And I also feel that my response to Postgate somehow goes beyond admiration or a or a nostalgia. Somehow Postgate's work is deep inside me.

Uh and I think that's true for so many of my generation that grew up in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Uh that voice still resonates and his influence can be found in the most extraordinary places. Uh so yes, I contend that uh despite what he might say in his trademark, bumbling, self deprecatory way, uh, that this work represents nothing less than a touchstone for our national imagination.

And in that sense it's profoundly important. Can you remember what it was that went so deep for you as as a child? the sense of being told a story, it's almost as if he came out from behind the screen and sort of sat with you. Um I think it was Michael Palin that said that uh he was the creator of the worlds but he somehow

uh presented himself as somebody who didn't have complete control over them. And so he was observing with you a lot of the time. And I think that intimacy of storytelling and the beauty and the sort of As I say, the accessibility of the pictures and the stories. W were you inspired by the Pogleswood setting? I I noticed that both the teletubies and in the night garden were set in the countryside too.

It's interesting because like a lot of things with Postgate and we should mention Peter Furman as well, his great collaborator, um It's hard to tell whether it was an intentional thing or out of necessity. You know, these these films were shot in a cow shed in and the Kentish countryside was the background to an awful lot of

uh the goings on. Kent was a background to much of my childhood, so yes, I think it resonates in that way for me as well personally. T tell me a little bit more about your background. What drew you into children's programming? Um, I suppose I can trace my children's television work back to uh studying speech sciences at University College London. I intended to be a speech therapist. But uh then when I left university

I went into theatre and uh set up a theatre company with a friend. I remember reading somewhere that you l you learned that people like it when when puppets make mistakes. Oh yes, and that's definitely something that came out of when I was training as a speech therapist. the first thing you have to do with a child is to to encourage them to speak so that you can get a a sample of their speech and Children in a clinical environment of

often will want to say nothing at all. Um and so there's an art to actually getting them to to to talk. But the The thing that I learnt that unfailingly got a response was when the the puppadil the toy made mistakes and said silly things like, uh you know what a lovely hat this is. I think I'm going to put it on my head when you're Just picking up something like a teacup or something like that. And then the child is absolutely

dying to say, you know, no this is not this is not a hat. You're very silly. And uh you know, being right is so much at a premium for a child. Um it it Something that I've never forgotten right the way through. I think that you have to make a playful atmosphere and characters have to be silly and yes, they have to get things wrong. Is Bagpus your favourite?

Um, Bagpus is fantastic, but I have to say my favourite and I think it depends, you know, when you were growing up. And for me the clangers was the real uh pinnacle, I suppose. This little planet where we live, we would never realize just from looking at it how complex and convenient the lives of the people who live there have become. See, no factory. No cars or railways, no toothbrushes, no plastic mixing bowls. None of the millions of articles that man manufactures to comfort his short life.

Our expert here in the studio is the cultural historian Matthew Sweet. Matthew, what can you tell us about Postgate's childhood? Mm hmm. Well he was born in nineteen twenty-five into what we could call a kind of socialist. Aristocracy. They were kind of the tennis playing sort of socialists. So His father was Raymond Posgate, who was the editor of uh the uh Labour newspaper Tribune

Um and his mother was uh Daisy Lansbury, who was a a suffragette and whose father was um the Labour leader George Lansbury. So they're very much part of a kind of intellectual culture. Um rather neglected those children, I think, because they were so busy with this kind of party work. So one of the things that Postgate always said about his childhood i is that he felt slightly cursed. He spoke of having a witch's gift.

which which meant that he was burdened with a sense of inadequacy. Throughout his whole life he believed that his parents preferred his older brother and were more interested in him. And his response to this, he said, was to be a bit of a show off. He felt Not good enough. And so he had to work that bit harder to amuse people or engage people. He was born in nineteen twenty five and he was sent to

Dartington. Yes. The school with no rules it was called, wasn't it? Except the rule was that you had to, you know, design your own curriculum really. And he really didn't like that. He wanted to be told what to do. He wanted to know what he ought to do. So, in a way this was sort of the making of him, uh, because it meant that he was always

uh jiggering at something on his own. He be he was an inventor, really postgate. Something of an idealist? Yes. He was a conscientious objector. Conscientious objector, his father had been a conscientious objector in the First World War. Postgate was a conscientious objector in the second, and the two of them did not agree about this. But Oliver Postgate

not quite stuck to his guns, that's the wrong expression, isn't it? But when he got his uh call up papers, he he reported to barracks and said, Look, um, I'm not going. Um I want to I want to object. And nobody quite knew what to do with him. So this rather kind of Sergeant Wilson like uh figure asked him if he would mind awfully getting into a cell. And they did process him, he was court martialed

um and he ended up working on the land. And I think in a way the mark of that's very strong on the work because if we think about the kind of pastoral dimension of Bagpus particularly, seems to be in touch with something in a in a deep English folk tradition, and I think that is part of that uh the debt that Postgate owed to that period when he was you know, he was like d digging trenches, planting trees.

Agpus, as you say, was pastoral, but it was almost entirely a debate from beginning to end. Um it started with an objective.

Professor Yaffel would then look at it and say, What is this? You know, it's just a load of old rubbish or something and then someone else would chime in and say, No, it's not, it's the crown of a frog princess, and I know a song about it, and it would go on and on and I think Professor Yaffel is a particularly interesting character because he sort of represented that part of the background of Uh postgate, which was the sort of academic

um opinionated part of it if you like. And and I think Bagpus was almost sort of pushing back against that. It was always the creativity, it was always the story or the song that got things done, that got the object uh put back together again. Yavelhoo's the sceptical woodpecker in Bagbirth. Based quite explicitly on Bertrand Russell, his sort of mannerisms are drawn from Russell.

Uh he's quite often wrong, isn't he, Professor Yaffle? And it's those more proletarian mice who get to the bottom of what's going on. Except there's an episode of Bagbus, I think the finest one, and I know you'll agree with about this, Andrew, where uh A mill is brought into the shop.

The mice say that chocolate biscuits can be produced if you add breadcrumbs and butter beans to this uh this machine. And it's a beautiful, beautiful illusion. This is this is really uh and these ideas are are inescapable always.

with Postgate. This is Postgate musing on the workings of capitalism. You heard him doing that in that Klangers introduction where he talks about mixing bowls and but Yafel is right there, isn't he? Yaffel scepticism is the thing that reveals what's really going on. Yeah.

Yes, on that occasion I have to give you that. He was he was right eventually. Presumably he didn't go straight from um prison, as it were, in to television. What what happened in between? Well he after the war he went to went to Germany uh and was helping in the aftermath there, helping children in orphanages, making sure that people were fed.

Um, and then when he came back from there he drifted around for a bit. He tried being an actor, he went to Rada. He had a a business that supplied mechanical um devices to shop windows. So, you know, your Christmas display might have, you know, something moving inside it. he understood things like pendulums and magnets. So he'd built some of the mechanical objects at the Festival of Britain in nineteen fifty one and took Benzadrine for a week so he could stay up and and complete the work.

But he was a rather kind of unsatisfied figure, I think, until television came into his life. There's a bit here from his memoir, Seeing Things, about this particular moment in his life. At that time I was, to put it bluntly, thoroughly fed up with me. I was fed up with what might be called my personality, with the ingratiating, overwrought, jokey chap.

who was full of far fetched notions and fancies, and in an almost constant state of submerged agitation. He annoyed himself D do you think do you think he n annoyed other people? I don't know. He's not he's not one of those people who a after they went people grumbled about there aren't stories about him being unreasonable, are there? No gosh, there are plenty about other other people from

From his professional environment. Let's hear from one of his colleagues, the folk musician and singer, Sandra Kerr, worked on Bagpus with him. I mean the first impressions were of this O to be honest, overgrown schoolboy. And he always said that he and Peter Furmin had never grown up. That's why they did what they did.

probably with such um success as well. If you listen uh very closely to the soundtrack, you can hear his stifling giggles,'cause it was such fun to do. You know he recorded the soundtrack. on a huge reel to reel tape recorder, we had to sing in high mouse voices, but slowly, So we'd go something like We will wash it, we will splash it, we will glitter it prettily pink. Okay, so that was that. Then he'd speed it up, and it would be higher.

Well wa but you could still hear and the words were clear. It was just genius really, you know, and he was warm and friendly and just so enthusiastic and supportive. If there was a big red button that would just demolish the internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I see you both nodding. It's so lovely to hear Sandra Kirk, so wonderful to hear that process.

Uh and you know, so many of the processes that he used were so simple actually. The speeding up to make the voices higher, you know, simple mechanical things that you could do. uh with material in those days. And it was really everything was working with material.

And the way that he worked together with with Peter Fermin, Peter Furmin almost gave him a set of giant play sets, if you like, and a set of toys to play with. And it meant that the scripts developed in a completely different way to many children's scripts I think, because it was really developing from this very limited world.

that then we had to play with. And I think that's that is the joy of live action. And it's him in a shed with these simple materials. He presses the shutter on the camera himself. He sh he pushes along the puppet or the piece of cardboard with a sharpened screwdriver

And his techniques don't really change for for a couple of decades. You might say that his character, Major Klanger, represents the sort of tinkering around. Yeah, there were a few inventors, I think, in in among his characters. Major Klanger Olaf the Lofty in Noggin a Nog. Um and there were machines as well. This is really important I think in the whole kind of the the aesthetics. of this world. When we look into the worlds of Oliver Postgate, we are seeing objects

that have textures and have almost a layer of dust on them sometimes. There's a kind of fusty I found this in the bottom drawer quality about the worlds that we see. They have they might they're made of Macarno, aren't they? And wool. And not only that, there's a sense I think with

with the objectiness of what he did, the makiness of what he did. It's so very easy to see how these things are constructed and to go away and make them yourself and play play them yourself. I mean I I spent ages making little paper things that could move or pop up or whatever on you know, and also trying to make the clangers caves, the little doors, these these wonderful little things that really spoke to you as a child that you really wanted to play with.

We're familiar with Postgate's voice narrating for children, but let's have a listen to him talking to an adult. This is from his two thousand and seven Desert Island Discs interview at the age of eighty two. I didn't exist unless I was doing something, unless I could show that I had achieved something. So I was f forced into

neurotic achievement almost. And Prue used to say to me, For goodness sake, get yourself a project you're not fit to live with. I felt I was like a mincing machine or a sausage machine and that if there was no sausage going through it minced itself. You mentioned Prue there. You had spent your life up until you met her, sort of drifting with that. Oh yes, absolutely, because I was trying to find ways of earning my living but the only end product was myself.

Um, I met Prue and she had already got three children. Ah the effect of falling in love with her was to make me feel able to do absolutely anything, you know. And I wasn't uh just feeding m my own ego or anything like this. I had really got to earn enough money to keep for other people, you know. So I immediately went and worked for the television as a stage manager. Matthew how did he get from stage manager in kids T V to writing and making it? Well, by by attracting attention

From the start really. Um he managed to get a series onto the air very early, um Alexander the Mouse. This was done live. Manipulating pieces of paper. with magnets under a table. If something went wrong or the magnet moved in the wrong direction then he would have to reach his hand into the frame on live T V and pull it back again. Um but there was a vitality about this and also he'd managed to do this on the smallest budget imaginable.

Uh and this led to to other work and he did either the engine first for for IT V and it it grew.

We we thought up stories and we didn't really think about them being anything except fun. I had no idea about the children, never gave them a thought. Having an infantile mind, I liked the ideas. I mean I or the engine, the Welsh engine that wants to sing in the choir.

I mean it had overtones of Dylan Thomas, it had overtones of all sorts for grown ups and also it was an amusing story for the children at the same time. But the point about it was if you did things solely intended for the kiddy winks, you're insulting them because children I believe learn by picking up fag ends. You know, they want to be round the edges of adult life and pick things up

Is that your approach? Well it's funny you say that. I mean, yes, of course. I mean uh I don't know if I fully believe him on that. I mean his description of children learn by picking up the vag ends is is not that far off Chomsky's uh poverty of stimulus argument. I mean He knows a lot more about children and childhood than he ever let on. What he is right about, and I think this this is where Postgate often comes into my life, is that

he works from that childish part, that childlike part of his mind. Um and I think that's very important and that's why I always go back to postgate materials when when I'm working on anything new because it connects me back to that childhood mind, particularly in things like the Pogles, where

for me, because I was born at the same time as the Bogle, looking at them. It's like looking at the archaeological relics of a lost cognition somehow. You're you're you're looking at at things that meant so much to you. And it's so great to be reminded and so important to be reminded that the way that you watch as a child is so completely different to the way that you watch as as an adult.

I think Postgate knows about the melancholy of childhood. He knows that childhood is something that is always being lost. So the worlds that we look into when we see his work are both very close and very, very far away, and I think the that understanding is very, very rare. It is and there was a melancholy to it. And it's something that nowadays is used very little, I think, or you see too little of it in particular children's television programmes because people are a little bit it seems

Frightened of the water. Yes, what oh thank you. That's a huge compliment. But but yes, I mean it's childhood isn't all happy. uh you know, a relentlessly happy character or relentlessly happy world is not very useful to a child and is actually somewhat depressing, I think.

The music is such an important element, too, isn't it? I I realise this is a show about Postgate, but should Vernon Elliot's name be up there with Postgate and Fermin when it comes to small films? I think so. Very much. Yeah. We know. Um there's been countless studies actually that that children don't really pay attention to words. Uh they're much more paying attention to the to the to the emotional content that the music.

I can still remember the the music from Ragtag and Bobtail. Yeah, you're right. It's central. There's something about Vernon and Elliot's woodwind and Oliver Postgate's voice that seem to be they're an ensemble, aren't they? Might they might almost be the same instrument. The bassoon as an instrument. It has such a range and it can be silly and pompous and ridiculous but it can also be beautifully

Sad and melancholic and and and thoughtful and reflective. You do write the music for your own programs, Andrew. Let's have a listen to the In the Night Garden title music. My producer says she regularly hears her children humming this music quietly to themselves. Going to sound rather pompous here. Are you conscious of your responsibility? Um as Someone whose work is is going to be amongst children's earliest influences.

Always, always you're aware of that huge responsibility and I often go back to a poem uh by Walt Whitman that was a child went forth and the first object they looked upon, that object they became, and that object became part of them for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

And what that says to me is that what you show a child becomes part of them in in in a way that is very difficult for us as adults to to understand. So what you show them is really critical. Um and I always use that poem at the beginning of any production or at the beginning of often a meeting or a or a presentation to bring us back to what it is that we're doing and how important it is. Can I ask each of you the the the same question? Would Oliver Postgate's work Work Now is

W has the world so changed that it wouldn't? It does work now. Um when children see it, they respond to it in exactly the same way that Andrew and I have and as I start to speak I start to feel emotional about that because I'm thinking about my own experience. as a child and where Postgate figured in that. I'm thinking of watching Bagpus and in the Night Garden with my children and the bond that that creates, that kind of tradition of s of of shared

Well what is it? It can't really be described. Children are really attuned to it. It's the people who commission television who are not. It's interesting. I mean it depends what you mean. Of course, children respond to it I think in exactly the same way as as as we did. In terms of making television today, it's everything that we try not to do. You know, it's it's very small, it's very cheap and there's very little of it. And uh the the landscape has changed so much.

I think there would be a huge nostalgia on on the part of programmers today for that time when everybody used to sit down and watch the same thing. the world where the BBC would ring you up and as they did with Postgate and Furmin and say, We've got a slot for you next year, please can you make something for it? I mean that A a a a dream. Let me read an excerpt from Seeing Things, uh, Postgate's memoir.

We now live in a world which no longer needs people. A world in which many people have no meaningful part to play in their own lives, and have gradually become passengers, inert consumers, farmed, nurtured, and given identity by supermarkets. Spin doctors and the bright, brittle media. Sounds a bit bitter. This was his always his attitude, you know. And yet The worlds that he built are the alternative to those things.

Those worlds I think were better worlds than the one that he actually lived in. I wonder whether his family's Socialism is also bad.

peeping through. I think definitely there's something about yeah, I have a strong suspicion that the Klanger Pl Planet is an a narco syndicalist cooperative. All of these are about groups of people working together, communities working together and I think sometimes the rejection of those supranational ideas, you know, think of either the engine, a small community can can run it and sing around it and create that little utopia.

Absolutely. Oliver Postgate died in two thousand and eight in Kent at the age of eighty three. But his creations live on. In fact, it's been recently announced that Bagpus the movie is going into production. What do you think Postcape would have thought of that prospect? I think you would think probably about the amount of work it would take to make it. Live action, which is uh sounds promising but that that's not it's not CGI. Okay, so the objects in the frame.

What do you think? Well I think he wasn't uh I think it would be a mistake to think of him as a somebody who was a kind of antagonist. Uh to the development of his own work. He was very keen on the merchandising. He was uh he wrote the annuals and the comic strips himself. I think he would have been very happy about it. And what would he think, Andrew, of us sitting round here now? uh discussing his work in sometimes quite high flown terms.

He was always very much against uh the elevation of his work to an art form or anything. He talked about his only art form was to make make make programming for ten pounds a minute. He didn't like theorizing. He didn't like people analyzing his work a or reading it in that way. But he loved that people loved it. My thanks to Matthew Sweet and to Andrew Davenport for the nomination, explanation, and adoration of Oliver Postgate. Goodbye. Yes. Did did I do the uh o wrong? Yeah, give him notes.

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