Creator of classic children’s TV shows, Peter Firmin, 89

Children’s show creator Peter Firmin was credited as having helped “lay the foundations” of today’s television industry.

He brought to life classic children’s shows including Ivor The Engine and Bagpuss and designed Basil Brush – but is probably best known for The Clangers.

His pink, long-nosed, inventive and lovable mouse-shaped creatures living on a small blue planet not far from Earth were an immediate smash hit with young viewers.

Having first appeared on screens in 1969, the BBC programme was relaunched three years ago – much to Firmin’s delight.

Speaking in 2015, the puppet-maker said he found the remake “exciting”, noting how modern technology had helped improve what the characters could do.

“Now they can dance, they can fly and they can jump,” he said.

“It’s exciting they can do so much. Before they couldn’t do that, they were tied to the floor.”

Born in Harwich in 1928, he trained at the Colchester School of Art, and after a period of National Service in the Navy, he attended the Central School of Art and Design.

It was while he was teaching there that he met Oliver Postgate.

Firmin then founded production company Smallfilms and dreamt up the show with Postgate, who died in 2008 and had been the programme’s narrator.

Firmin’s earlier creation, the Moon Mouse from his Noggin The Nog stories, provided the inspiration when the BBC asked him to create something set in space.

With the race to get the first man on the moon hotting up in the 1960s, Firmin’s Clangers characters brought children a world away from their living rooms and even beyond Earth.

His partnership with Postgate, which lasted half a century, “opened up the world of television to us and allowed us to explore new ways of telling stories to generations of children”, Firmin said.

Reacting to the news that he would be presented with a Special Award at the Bafta Children’s Awards in 2014, Firmin said it was “touching” that his work was remembered with affection decades after it first hit screens.

The chairperson of Bafta’s Children’s Committee at the time said Firmin “helped lay the foundations” of today’s TV industry.

In recent years, he criticised the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) on modern-day programmes – saying there was more life in his knitted puppets.

“I hate CGI faces on humans because you look in the eyes and there’s nothing there,” he said. “There’s no soul.” Retaining the knitted characters in the new Clangers was important to him, he said, as he took on the role of design consultant and co-executive producer on the revival.

“With HD and the very good production, you do feel you could almost hold them now,” he said.

“It was all very primitive then, though we didn’t think it was primitive.

“I hardly ever bought any new materials.”

Firmin, who died at his home in Kent aged 89, is survived by his wife Joan, six daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Picture: PA. Peter Firmin with some of his characters from The Clangers.