R.I.P. Oliver Postgate:
- Maev Kennedy
- The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008
As Tiny Clanger might have remarked, mournfully pulling his ears over his eyes, “wheep wheep wheeeeep”: Oliver Postgate, creator of the Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, and the immortal Bagpuss, the cat who retained an ineffable dignity even when in grave danger of losing his stuffing, has died aged 83.
“We bow our heads in respect,” one award-winning animation team said, part of the generation profoundly influenced by Postgate’s slightly shabby creatures, looking precisely as if they had been hand-knitted or run up out of scraps of wood, and animated in a cowshed in Kent.
Yesterday Peter Lord and David Sproxton, co-founders of Aardman Animations, makers of Morph, Creature Comforts and Wallace and Gromit, said: “…Those of us in early middle age recall with great pleasure the Sunday afternoon ritual of watching Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine or The Clangers. With Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate created wonderful, imaginative worlds, populated with delightful characters through which Oliver’s skill at story-telling shone through.
Has anyone fully theorized the long history of the aesthetic of British shabbiness? I want to check out this book Austerity Britain 1945-1951 which I suspect may hold some clues.
I guess these Smallfilms shows were kind of like the British version of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows (H.R. Pufnstuf, etc.), much better-seeming, though.
Here’s an episode of the Clangers:
And one of Pogle’s Wood — kind of scary!:
This Youtube comment amused me:
Clangers nooooooooooo not the clangers again.
My shrink convinced me they were a fiction in my mind
but here they are
real again
Ohhh help me please
God I’m so disturbed again
Ivan Kreilkamp 