His work was done
Animator and puppeteer who created the children’s favourite Bagpuss and co-created The Clangers
Peter Firmin, the creator of Bagpuss, The Clangers and Basil Brush, has died aged 89.
PETER FIRMIN, who has died aged 89, was an animator, puppeteer and film-maker and, with Oliver Postgate, founded the Smallfilms studio, creating many of the classic series on children’s television in the 1960s including Ivor The Engine, Pogles’ Wood, Bagpuss and The Clangers.
In 1963 Firmin also had a hand in the ribald anthropomorphic fox Basil Brush, making the first glove puppet for Basil’s creator, Ivan Owen, using a real fox’s tail (or brush).
Firmin was working as a young lecturer in fine art at the Central School of Art and Design in London when Oliver Postgate met him in 1958 and asked if he would prepare the artwork for Postgate’s new animation series Alexander the Mouse.
Initially Firmin was, in Postgate’s words, “a bit stuffy about it”, as he was paid only £1 an episode. So successful was the pilot, however, that the BBC commissioned 20 more, which led to further work for Firmin from other producers. But while Alexander the Mouse had been transmitted live, using a ground-breaking but unreliable system of magnetic animation, the pair’s next project was shot on 16mm film. This was the first of the Ivor the Engine films, shot in Firmin’s cowshed in Kent for £100.
In general, Firmin was responsible for the drawings, backdrops and characters while Postgate wrote the scripts and shot the pictures. But their relationship admitted the possibility of a blurring between their roles as they embarked on what some considered a model of 1960s hippie enterprise.
The couple went on to collaborate on many classic children’s series, including The Saga of Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss, both dreamt up by Firmin; with Postgate he created their masterpiece, The Clangers (1969), a series set on a tiny planet populated by small snout-nosed creatures which were knitted in bright pink wool by Firmin’s wife Joan. They ate blue string pudding, green soup furnished by the Soup Dragon, and lived in fear of falling meteorites and the Iron Chicken who lived in a spiky nest in the sky overhead. Unlike Firmin and Postgate’s previous work, The Clangers was filmed in colour.
While Postgate worked on the scripts, Firmin concentrated on making the puppets and the sets, fashioning much of the flora and fauna from yoghurt pots, copper wire and drinking-straws. First transmitted at the height of the Apollo space programme (Apollo 11 landed the first men on the moon in July 1969) The Clangers featured Firmin’s magical sets which created a perfect illusion of a tiny world in outer space. Absurdly, one Nasa engineer apparently described it as “a valiant attempt to bring a note of realism to the fantasy of the space race”.
The creatures themselves – named after the clanging sound of the dustbin lids that covered the entrance to their sub-lunar burrows – spoke in a language of articulate whistling squeaks which Firmin and Postgate recorded from Postgate’s scripts playing the inflections of the dialogue on swanee whistles in the hope that viewers would understand what was being said from these sounds alone.
Worried that some children would be unable to follow the ins and outs of Clanger-speak, Firmin and Postgate recorded a separate voice-over with running commentary; when this was removed at an international television sales fair, the Germans insisted the characters were speaking perfect German, while the Swedes were certain they spoke only Swedish.
After The Clangers came Bagpuss, originally That Cat, which appeared in the early 1970s, about a stuffed, jowly feline which slept in the window of an antiques shop with various bits of bric-a-brac that came to life. Firmin’s daughter played Emily, the cat’s human accomplice. Although only 13 episodes were ever made, Bagpuss was voted the most popular BBC children’s show ever.
Peter Arthur Firmin was born on December 11 1928 at Dovercourt, near Harwich in Essex, and studied at the Central School of Art with the engraver Gertrude Hermes. In 1959 after the success of Ivor The Engine,
Firmin moved his family to Blean, outside Canterbury, and settled in a rambling 18th century farmhouse with a huge, leaky thatched barn and cowshed which became his studio. Postgate followed to nearby Whitstable, and from that point the pair made Kent their base.
While travelling on a train through Neasden, the thought had occurred to Firmin that a set of benign-looking Nordic chessmen he had seen at the British Museum might be the basis of a new children’s television series. The pieces would be called Nogs, led by a prince called Noggin whose adversary and wicked uncle was Nogbad the Bad.
Firmin wrote a synopsis and shooting script for what became The
Saga of Noggin the Nog and offered it to ITV, who turned it down. The BBC did buy it, however, paying Firmin and Postgate £100 for each 10-minute episode. It won the BBC telecine department’s award for the best children’s programme of 1959.
Another series The Seal Of Neptune
(1960) featuring Firmin’s soft, watery drawings fetched £125 per episode from the BBC, while ITV commissioned a stop-frame series about some stuffed penguins called Pingwings. Firmin’s next creation was a shaggy Cockney mongrel dog puppet called Fred Barker, which appeared with Postgate (playing a lighthousekeeper) in a 26-part series called The Dogwatch. The puppet was worked by Ivan Owen, a friend of Postgate’s, who later became the unseen manipulator and voice of Basil Brush.
With Postgate, Firmin prepared books and comic strips about Ivor The Engine and in 1962 made a second television series about the character for ITV, followed by a second Saga of Noggin The Nog for the BBC. Meanwhile Firmin’s puppet creations Fred Barker and Ollie Beak continued to appear on television regularly, and in 1963 Firmin fashioned his most famous children’s character, Basil Brush, who joined the other two in a programme called The Three Scampies.
Firmin was paid £12 for the original Basil, and received a further £1 for each television appearance the glove puppet made. Firmin designed it so that Ivan Owen’s right hand filled the head, his thumb moving the jaw. Two wires operated by Owen’s left hand worked the arms. Firmin reportedly retrieved Basil’s first tail, or brush, from a roadkill on the M2 motorway.
When The Three Scampies ended, Basil Brush moved to a late-night BBC chat show hosted by the magician David Nixon, and was given his own programme three years later.
In 1965 Firmin and Postgate’s BBC series The Pogles, about a couple who live in a beech tree, developed into a programme for younger viewers to Watch With Mother called Pogles’ Wood. Warmly approved by pre-school children, and later turned into successful picture books and annuals which Firmin illustrated, it attracted the ire of an academic sociologist who lectured its creators about making films showing the delights of rural rather than urban life.
Latterly Firmin returned to printmaking and in 2008, with his daughter Hannah Firmin, an illustrator, mounted an exhibition of prints at Whitstable.
Peter Firmin is survived by his wife Joan and by six daughters.
Peter Firmin, born December 11 1928, died July 1 2018