Oliver Postgate

0:00If 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 1958 and 1972, beginning with Ivor 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 important... ..the most beautiful... ..the most magical... The most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world was, of course, Bagpuss, which is regularly voted the best children's TV programme of all time.

1:01And it's from the world of children's television that our guest comes to. 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 Teletubbies. Andrew, eh-oh. Eh-oh. What is it about Postgate, Oliver Postgate? Well, there's nobody else that I can think of whose work has so profoundly inspired me from my earliest childhood right up to my adult professional life. His stories, his characters, the worlds, the beautiful language he uses, and of course the famously homespun and accessible manner of the productions as well.

1:52but also the values, the principles, the utter kindness of the work 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 a conscious admiration or a nostalgia somehow Postgate's work is deep inside me and I think that's true for so many of my generation that grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s that voice still resonates and his influence can be found in the most extraordinary places. So yes, I contend that despite what he might say in his trademark, bumbling, self-deprecatory way, that this work represents nothing less than a touchstone for our national imagination.

2:40And in that sense, it's profoundly important. Can you remember what it was that went so deep for you as a child? And 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. I think it was Michael Palin that said that he was the creator of the worlds, but he somehow 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. Were you inspired by the Pogel's Wood setting?

3:23I noticed that both the Teletubbies 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, it's hard to tell whether it was an intentional thing or out of necessity. You know, these films were shot in a cow shed and the Kentish countryside was the background to an awful lot of 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. Tell me a little bit more about your background. What drew you into children's programming?

4:01me? I suppose I can trace my children's television work back to studying speech sciences at University College London and I intended to be a speech therapist but then when I left university I went into theatre and set up a theatre company with a friend. I remember reading somewhere that you 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 encourage them to speak so that you can get a sample of their speech. And children in a clinical environment often will want to say nothing at all.

4:42And so there's an art to actually getting them to talk. But the thing that I learned that unfailingly got a response was when the puppet or the toy made mistakes and said silly things like, you know, what a lovely hat this is. I think I'm going to put it on my head when you're 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 a hat. You're very silly. And, you know, being right is so much at a premium for a child. It's 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.

5:20And yes, they have to get things wrong. Is Bagpuss your favourite? Bagpuss 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 pinnacle, I suppose. This little planet where we live, we would never realise just from looking at it how complex and convenient the lives of the people who live there have become. One can see no factories, no roads, 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.

6:06Matthew, what can you tell us about Postgate's childhood? Well, he was born in 1925 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 Postgate, who was the editor of the Labour newspaper Tribune, and his mother was Daisy Lansbury, who was a suffragette and whose father was the Labour leader George Lansbury. So they're very much part of a kind of intellectual culture. 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 is that he felt slightly cursed.

6:49He spoke of having a witch's gift, 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 that everything he said was not good enough and so he had to work that bit harder to amuse people or engage people. He was born in 1925 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 design your own curriculum. Yes. And he really didn't like that.

7:28He 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 because it meant that he was always jiggering at something on his own. He was an inventor, really, post-Gate. 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 call-up papers, he reported to barracks and said, look, I'm not going.

8:10I want to object. Nobody quite knew what to do with him. So this rather kind of Sergeant Wilson-like figure asked him if he would mind awfully getting into a cell. And they did process him. He was court-martialed and he ended up working on the land. And I think in a way the mark of that is 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 deep English folk tradition. And I think that is part of the debt that Postgate owed to that period when he was, you know, he was like digging trenches, planting trees.

8:50Bagpus, as you say, was pastoral, but it was almost entirely a debate from beginning to end. It started with an object. 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 Yafel is a particularly interesting character because he sort of represented that part of the background of Postgate, which was the sort of academic opinionated part of it, if you like. And I think Bagpuss was almost sort of pushing back against that.

9:27It was always the creativity. It was always the story or the song that got things done, that got the object put back together again. Yafel, who's the sceptical woodpecker in Bagpuss. based quite explicitly on Bertrand Russell. His sort of mannerisms are drawn from Russell. He's quite often wrong, isn't he, Professor Yaffel? 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 him about this, Andrew, where 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 machine.

10:08And it's a beautiful, beautiful allusion. This is really, and these ideas are inescapable always with Postgate, this is Postgate musing on the workings of capitalism. You heard him doing that in that Clangers introduction where he talks about mixing bowls. But Yafel is right there, isn't he? Yafel's scepticism is the thing that reveals what's really going on. Yes, yes. On that occasion, I have to give you that. He was right eventually. Presumably he didn't go straight from prison, as it were, to television. What happened in between? Well, after the war he went to Germany and was helping in the aftermath there, helping children in orphanages, making sure that people were fed and then when he came back from there he drifted around for a bit.

10:56He tried being an actor he went to RADA. He had a business that supplied mechanical devices to shop windows so 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 1951 and took Benzedrine for a week so he could stay up 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.

11:38I 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. Do you think he annoyed other people? I don't know. All the stories... He's not one of those people who, after they went, people grumbled about. There aren't stories about him being unreasonable, are there? No, no, no. Gosh, there are plenty about other people from his professional environment. Let's hear from one of his colleagues. The folk musician and singer, Sandra Kerr, worked on Bagpuss with him, creating the music with John Faulkner voicing Madeleine the Ragdoll and singing all the wonderful mouse-mending songs.

12:27I mean, the first impressions were of this, to be honest, overgrown schoolboy, And he always said that he and Peter Furman had never grown up. That's why they did what they did, probably with such success as well. If you listen very closely to the soundtrack, you can hear us stifling giggles because 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 splosh it, we will glitter it, prettily pink. OK, so that was that. Then he'd speed it up and it would be higher.

13:19but 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 I see you both nodding it's so lovely to hear Sandra Kerr it's so wonderful to hear that process 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 with material in those days. And it was really, everything was working with materials. And the way that he worked together with Peter Furman, Peter Furman almost gave him a set of giant play sets, if you like, and a set of toys to play with.

14:07And 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 you had to play with. And I think 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 pushes along the puppet or the piece of cardboard with a sharpened screwdriver. And his techniques don't really change for a couple of decades. You might say that his character Major Clanger represents the sort of tinkering around. Yeah, there were a few inventors, I think, in among his characters.

14:45Major Clanger, Olaf the Lofty in Noggin' and Og. And there were machines. Machines played such a role in so many stories. And machines often came to life as well. This is really important, I think, in the whole kind of 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're made of makano, aren't they? And wool. And not only that, there's a sense, I think, with the objectiness of what he did, the makiness of what he did.

15:26It's so very easy to see how these things are constructed and to go away and make them yourself and play them yourself. I mean, I spent ages making little paper things that could move or pop up or whatever, and also trying to make the clangers' caves, the little doors, 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 2007 Desert Island Discs interview at the age of 82. I didn't exist unless I was doing something, unless I could show that I had achieved something.

16:09So I was 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. Oh, yes, absolutely, because I was trying to find ways of earning my living, but the only end product was myself. I met Prue, and she had already got three children. The effect of falling in love with her was to make me feel able to do absolutely anything, you know.

16:50And I wasn't just feeding my own ego or anything like this. I had really got to earn enough money to keep four 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' TV to writing and making it? Well, by attracting attention from the start, really. He managed to get a series onto the air very early, 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 TV and pull it back again.

17:36But there was a vitality about this. And also he'd managed to do this on the smallest budget imaginable. And this led to other work. And he did either the engine first for ITV and it grew. 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, Ivo 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.

18:17But the point about it was if you did things solely intended for the kiddywinks, you're insulting them because children, I believe, learn by picking up fag ends. You know, they want to be around the edges of adult life and pick things up. Is that your approach? Do you think about the children? Well, it's funny you say that. I mean, yes, of course. I mean, I don't know if I fully believe him on that. I mean, his description of children learned by picking up the fag ends is not that far off Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. I mean, he knows a lot more about children and childhood than he ever let on.

19:00What he is right about, and I think this is where Postgate often comes into my life, is that he works from that childish part, that childlike part of his mind. And I think that's very important. And that's why I always go back to Postgate's materials 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 Pogles, looking at them, it's like looking at the archaeological relics of a lost cognition somehow. Now, you're looking 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 an adult.

19:50I 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 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 particularly children's television programmes because people are a little bit, it seems, frightened of anything. You use it, Andrew, and that's why yours are so good. Yes, well, oh, thank you. That's a huge compliment.

20:27But yes, I mean, childhood isn't all happy. You know, a relentlessly happy character or a 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 realise this is a show about Postgate, but should Vernon Elliott's name be up there with Postgate and Fermin when it comes to small films? I think so, very much, yeah. We know there's been countless studies, actually, that children don't really pay attention to words. They're much more paying attention to the emotional content that the music contains.

21:10I can still remember the music from Ragtag and Bobtail. You're right, it's central. There's something about Vernon Elliot's woodwind and Oliver Postgate's voice that seem to be... They're an ensemble, aren't they? 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 thoughtful and reflective. You do write the music for your own programmes, Andrew. Let's have a listen to the In the Night Garden title music.

21:57My 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 as someone whose work 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 by Walt Whitman. There 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 a way that is very difficult for us as adults to understand.

22:47So what you show them is really critical. And I always use that poem at the beginning of any production or at the beginning of often a meeting 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 same question? Would Oliver Postgate's work work now? Has the world so changed that it wouldn't? It does work now. When children see it, they respond to it 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.

23:28I'm thinking of watching Bagpuss and In the Night Garden with my children and the bond that that creates, that kind of tradition 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 we did. In terms of making television today, it's everything that we try not to do. You know, it's very small, it's very cheap, and there's very little of it. And the landscape has changed so much. I think there would be a huge nostalgia on the part of programme makers today for that time when everybody used to sit down and watch the same thing.

24:17The world where the BBC would ring you up, as they did with Postgate and Furman, and say, we've got a slot for you next year, at least can you make something for it? I mean, that's a dream. Let me read an excerpt from Seeing Things, 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 always his attitude. You can hear this buzzing away in the background of some of the television that he made And yet the worlds that he built are the alternative to those things.

25:09Those worlds, I think, were better worlds than the one that he actually lived in. I wonder whether his family's socialism is also peeping through. I think definitely there's something about, yeah, I have a strong suspicion that the Klanger planet is an anarcho-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 run it and sing around it and create that little utopia. Absolutely. Oliver Postgate died in 2008 in Kent at the age of 83.

25:50But his creations live on. In fact, it's been recently announced that Bagpuss the movie is going into production. What do you think Postgate would have thought of that prospect? I think you would think probably about the amount of work it would take to make it. I hear that it's live action, which sounds promising. Live action? Apparently, in the sense of it's not CGI. It's not CGI, okay. So there will be objects in the frame. What do you think? Well, I think he wasn't... I think it would be a mistake to think of him as somebody who was a kind of antagonist. Definitely. to the development of his own work.

26:29He was very keen on the merchandising. 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 around here now discussing his work in sometimes quite high-flown terms? He was always very much against the elevation of his work to an art form or anything. He talked about his only art form was to make programming for£10 a minute. which is not very much. He didn't like theorising. He didn't like people analysing his work or reading it in that way. But he loved that people loved it. He was always willing to accept people's love for his work.

27:14My thanks to Matthew Sweet and to Andrew Davenport for the nomination, explanation and adoration of Oliver Postgate. Goodbye. yes did i do the air wrong yeah give him notes okay that's more like it