Why do they remake the classics of children’s TV? It can’t be for the children – in my house, at least, they don’t care what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 30 years ago. No, children’s TV gets remade for the parents. They’re the ones who control the remote and they’re much more likely to give in to pleas for just one more episode before bedtime if it’s an episode of something that brings back warm, furry, probably illusory memories of their own childhoods.
With that in mind it seems fair to review the new version of Clangers (CBeebies), the stop-motion story of five knitted mice who live on another planet and communicate only in the plangent tones of the swanee whistle, through an adult’s eyes, as it was meant for me anyway.
My recollections of Clangers meld into my recollections of Ivor the “pier-shtee-coff” Engine and Bagpuss the saggy old cloth cat, because all three were voiced by Oliver Postgate. You are supposed to think of Postgate’s voice as a comfy jumper of calm, but even as a child I always found it sinister (then again, I found most things quite sinister, that lugubrious MI6 plant Bagpuss especially). To me, Postgate sounded like the man in the Post Office queue barely maintaining control over his anger, just one misplaced stamp away from laying waste to the packaging concession.
Postgate died in 2008 and has been replaced in this new version by Michael Palin, yet I have to say that the new Clangers is worse for Postgate’s absence. It’s not Palin’s fault, but the old series had a likeably despondent edge. It was – rightly – sceptical of what humans were doing to the galaxy. It quite often began with a Postgate homily reminding all those grinning three-year-olds out there that humanity was small and meaningless in the context of a vast, indifferent universe. It regularly mentioned death.
New Clangers is essentially a direct remake with the same characters but much better animation – modern stop motion hardly looks like it’s stopping at all. Yet what it now lacks is that slightly sad pungency. Its story in episode one, about the search for a missing melody, offered up a metaphor for some old Clangers- style melancholia, but opted not to use it, instead just telling the story deadbolt straight. Of course, the kids won’t care, and sales of knitted mice should peak just in time for Christmas. But it’s another example of how children’s TV has become sanitised, just like so much else in children’s lives.
There have been several excellent police documentaries in the past year – 24 Hours in Police Custody, The Detectives and now The Met: Policing London (BBC One) – but all of them have left me with one overriding thought: what we did do before CCTV?
I don’t just mean in regards to crimebusting, though heaven knows how a murder like the one in the second episode of The Met (a young father stabbed at a pub in a case of mistaken identity) would ever have been solved without cameras everywhere. It also highlighted how the footage was all the police had to go on.
Not only does CCTV appear to be vital in solving crimes, but it’s also now the backbone of all of these superb police TV series. CCTV footage cannot be faked where many other aspects of the documentary can. CCTV provided this episode with all of the best pictures of the Notting Hill carnival going (inevitably) awry; and it provided the identity of a man who was attacking Muslim women.
There is a less obvious narrative at work in The Met which can be almost as enjoyable to follow as the story of the police at work: the Metropolitan Police want to come out of the series looking better than they went into it. But the producers want to prove that it is more than just a puff piece. At some stage a covenant has been struck but look hard and you can sense both sides pushing their own agenda.
The police officer caught on a microphone describing the worldfamous carnival atmosphere as “like f-----g hell on earth”, for example, is probably there to show that the BBC aren’t the Met’s patsies.
In the PR war, I’d say the Met are ahead of the BBC on points so far – policing London, by this account, appears to be an impossible task which some very decent people nonetheless strive to pursue. I await with interest the moment when some sensational CCTV footage shows the police in a less than radiant light, though I suspect I may be waiting some time.