CONTENTS
Foreword
1. Stroking Bees
2. A House, Three Schools and A War
3. Stirring It Up
4. Rural Pursuits
5. The Honey-Barrel
6. Treading the Boards
7. Rattling the Bars
8. Starting Again
9. Smallfilms
10. Taking Time
11. Mainstream
12. Colouring In
13. Looking Outwards
14. Looking Inwards
15. The Window
16. Africa and After
17. Decade of Dementia
18. Changing Direction
Afterword
There is a period from early middle-age onwards when one is prone to become nostalgic about the childhood brand of sweets one ate in the playground and the kind of toys one played with in the bedroom: ooh, those Spangles, foaming shrimps and rice paper flying saucers – aah, good old Mousetrap, Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky. We remember too the intensity of concentration and ecstasy with which we watched television during what my generation is convinced was the Golden Age of children’s broadcasting: Rentaghost, Robinson Crusoe, Blue Peter and – above all, supremely above all – the masterpieces of Oliver Postgate, Pogle’s Wood, Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine.
From today’s perspective, when the smallest amount of success is recognised with instant celebrity and riches, it seems extra ordinary that Postgate and his partner at Smallfilms, Peter Firmin, could have penetrated, stimulated and entranced the minds and imaginations of so many generations of children and yet themselves have remained relatively anonymous. From what I know of Oliver Postgate, riches and celebrity were never his goal.
The story of how he and Firmin started Smallfilms and began their thirty year journey as storytellers is well told by Oliver in this wonderful autobiography. Few of his early contemporaries might have guessed that Oliver would become a children’s writer, puppeteer, artist and narrator and even fewer would have guessed that his career would provide such a contribution to the richness, comity and joy of Britain. He was either too modest or too unaware of the reach and importance of his programmes ever to vaunt his achievements, but they were inestimable.
The levels of charm, narrative pleasure, characterisation, wit and complete lack of condescension apparent in all of Postgate’s work were rare enough then; today they are all but extinct. During bouts of childhood theism, I always supposed that if God had a voice it would be that of Oliver Postgate, the same matchless blend of authority, kindliness and humour. And if Oliver was God then we were all inhabitants of the planet ‘far, far away where the Clangers live’, where we could also find the Soup Dragon, Noggin, Olaf the Lofty, Ivor, Professor Yaffle and Jones the Steam, not to mention that ‘old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams’ who starred in what was voted the best children’s programme of all time in a 1999 poll.
There are all kinds of ways of thinking about service: there is the kind Oliver never had truck with, military service, but, as he proved throughout his long, fulfilled life, it is possible to serve your country by inspiring its children and enriching its culture. There may be no medals struck for that, but there is the award of the abiding love and gratitude of millions.
Stephen Fry
DISCLAIMER
This is not a story, this is a life.
Having spent much of my life writing stories, I am used to being in control of the material I have thought up. I can alter it, mould it to my fancy and fit it tidily into a plot with a beginning, a proper middle and an end.
I tried to do the same with this and of course it didn’t work. My life was already there, already fully inconsistent, irrevocably tangled, ill-timed and beset with incongruous events.
I suppose if I had been a dedicated person, one like my grandfather, who had a single guiding purpose throughout his life, there might have been a significant narrative on which to thread the events. But, although I have committed myself fairly passionately to various causes and purposes, these have come and gone as randomly as the circumstances that gave rise to them.
Even the main work of my life, making films for children’s television – Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss and the others – was not something I deliberately trained for and set out to do. It was something I slipped into almost by accident, because of some trouble with magnets.
So, in the end, I simply looked through my memory for the pieces that have, for reasons of their own, stayed with me, perhaps because they once made sense, illuminated some perception, caused grief or joy, or were just fun. I have assembled the incidents in more or less chronological order and have put together what seems to be a sort of travel book.
The engine wasn’t reliable, the track was badly laid, it led through dark tunnels and into weedy sidings, and as to where it was heading … your guess is as good as mine!
But I hope you will enjoy the scenery.
Oliver Postgate
December 1999
I. Going back.
On a dull day in the early 1990s, I took the number 13 bus to Hendon, got off at the corner of Shirehall Lane and walked along it towards the house where I was born.
Shirehall Lane, a quiet suburban street, was definitely familiar. The big elm trees had gone but the same houses were there, though they seemed smaller and closer together than I remembered. But as well as that, something was different, something was missing. Then I saw what it was: people. Nobody was coming or going, nothing was happening. The street was deserted.
As
