Quiet genius of maverick double-act who made the 1970s a golden age of kids’ TV

In the lands of the north, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the Men of the northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale... and those tales they tell are the stories of a kind and wise king and his people; they are the sagas of noggin the nog...’

It’s as soothing as an incantation and, for those of us of a certain age and 40 years after the last adventures of kindly if slightly dim noggin were made, immediately conjures up a magical world of past children’s television.

It was produced on a shoestring but with tenderness and wit, by two whimsical middle-aged men. not just the cod-Viking adventures of noggin the nog – but the Pogles, the Clangers, Ivor the Engine and, of course, Bagpuss.

Even when things went dreadfully wrong – the truculent Scottish hedgehog Spike McPike, for instance – Oliver Postgate, Peter Firmin and their Smallfilms stop-motion animation enterprise always seemed to land on their feet.

The career of Spike McPike’s sidekick, for instance, went unexpectedly supernova. His name? Basil Brush.

Postgate and Firmin hailed from the sort of gentle, woofly-voiced, self-consciously socially aware background where all would be well in a world where God read the Manchester Guardian.

Born in 1925, Postgate was the grandson of George Lansbury – briefly a highminded and ineffectual leader of the Labour Party – and was brought up in the sort of house where HG Wells dropped by for coffee and Bertrand Russell, no less, was a frequent visitor.

AnD if Postgate was the storyteller, Firmin, a beard-and-corduroy type into tall ships, was the craftsman who fashioned assorted puppets out of next to nothing. Then story lines were comfortable with the welfare state, as personified in the fretting Soup Dragon on the planet of the Clangers.

And, in Bagpuss, there was surely the ultimate in Corbynista high-mindedness.

‘There was a little girl and her name was Emily. And she had a shop… It was rather an unusual shop because it didn’t sell anything.’

Emily, as seen in the show’s opening stills, was Firmin’s own young daughter.

Of vast imagination if with scant resources – Smallfilms, first based in a cowshed, was later promoted to a row of repurposed pigsties – Postgate and Firmin had another advantage: the television for small children they sought to outdo was pretty awful.

Like the witless Muffin the Mule, or the glassy-eyed, rompered Andy Pandy.

Thus the determined pair begot ‘a golden age of children’s TV’, Daniel Postgate reflected after his father’s death in 2008.

‘Oliver and Peter were mavericks. They were pioneers in doing what people hadn’t done before. They did it in a cheap, seat-of-their-pants way and were left to their own devices to make what they wanted.’

Postgate certainly had a gift of snatching ideas from the air. noggin the nog, for instance, was inspired when – casually visiting the British Museum – he first laid eyes on the Lewis Chessmen. Sometimes technical difficulties led to inspiration.

Ivor the Engine, after all – the wee Welsh locomotive who longed to sing in the choir, in a story line whose essential melancholy owed much to Dylan Thomas – came to life because it was far easier to animate a character on wheels than someone with legs.

Debuting in black and white in 1958, Ivor was Smallfilm’s first outing – psshty-coo, psshty-coo – and was later remade in colour in 1975.

Sometimes things went majestically wrong. Bagpuss had been conceived as a marmalade cat but, when returned from the dyeing, he was a disconcerting pink.

Postgate and Firmin eyed each other, shrugged, and simply kept the colour.

Swallows every summer nested in the shed where the world of the Clangers took shape. Cleaning up the droppings was a morning chore.

And when the Soup Dragon was overnight left with a little chocolate on his claws, mice not only devoured it but had a good chew on the puppet too.

It’s difficult to agree on one standout Postgate/Firmin collaboration. Many have abiding affection for noggin the nog because, though of thoughtful storyline, the production is so simple. But millions regard one show – produced from 1968 to 1973 – as their masterpiece.

It was a particularly daunting milestone as it was the first show they made in colour and – as nasa’s Apollo project neared fruition – very topical.

FIRMIn assembled the Clangers with wire and pipe-cleaners, their beautifully articulated little skeletons. Mrs Firmin knitted their woolly bodies. And, in the most inspired touch, Oliver Postgate wrote reams of dialogue that was never actually spoken.

Instead, he and a mate reproduced the rhythm of each sentence on swanee whistles. So speech-like were the results that, even now, you can still make out every word.

Astonishingly, it even transcends nationality. Screening the Clangers at some international convention, folk from Frankfurt were enchanted. However did the Clangers speak such excellent German? A Stockholm delegation bristled, though. ‘That is not so. They spoke only Swedish...’

Postgate had only one fright, when the airing of an episode about a human astronaut landing on the Clanger’s bin-lidded moon coincided with an actual Apollo landing. If there was an American tragedy, there would surely be an outcry.

But it was too late to change the schedules and, in the event, nothing went wrong.

Later, one nasa scientist commended the show. The Clangers, he said, was ‘a valiant attempt to bring a note of realism to the fantasy of the space programme’.

But, in 1999, and to widespread surprise, a large-scale BBC poll found that the bestloved children’s TV programme of all time was Bagpuss.

It was all the more astonishing because only 13 episodes were ever made and the 1974 tales had last been broadcast in 1986. Postgate and Firmin were thrilled.

And this last great achievement was, I suppose, a metaphor for childhood itself: that capacity for wonder that brings inanimate things to life, spins entire magical worlds – and, if we are not careful, one day deserts us for ever.

‘The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ. Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls. And Professor Yaffle was a carved, wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker.

‘Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams.

‘But Emily loved him.’