Happy Birthday: Richard Oliver Postgate (12 April 1925 – 8 December 2008) was an English animator, puppeteer, and writer. He was the creator and writer of some of Britain's most popular children's television programmes. Bagpuss, Pingwings, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Pogles' Wood, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with collaborator, artist and puppet maker Peter Firmin. The programmes were originally broadcast by the BBC from the 1950s to the 1980s. In a 1999 BBC poll Bagpuss was voted the most popular children's television programme of all time.
Clangers (usually referred to as The Clangers) is a British stop-motion animated children's television series, consisting of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures who live on, and inside, a small moon-like planet. They speak only in a whistled language, and eat green soup (supplied by the Soup Dragon) and blue string pudding. The programmes were originally broadcast on BBC1 between 1969 and 1972, followed by a special episode which was broadcast in 1974.
The series was made by Smallfilms, the company set up by Oliver Postgate (who was the show's writer, animator and narrator) and Peter Firmin (who was its modelmaker and illustrator). Firmin designed the characters, and Joan Firmin, his wife, knitted and "dressed" them. The music, often part of the story, was provided by Vernon Elliott.
A third series, narrated by Monty Python actor Michael Palin, was broadcast in the UK in June 2015 on the BBC's CBeebies TV channel, gaining hugely successful viewing figures, following on from a short special broadcast by the BBC earlier that year. The new programmes are still made using stop-motion animation (instead of the computer-generated imagery which had replaced the original stop-motion animation in revivals of other children's shows such as Fireman Sam, Thomas & Friends and The Wombles). Further new series were made in 2017 and 2019.
Clangers won the British Academy Children's Award for Pre-School Animation in 2015.
[I LOVED The Clangers growing up - although I was probably a bit 'old' for them. I *think* either my Mum or my Nan knitted me one (or that could've been for my sister.... possibly.....]
3 comments:
My SO and I were going through clips from shows of our childhoods, and he introduced me to Clanger. It was equal parts cute and quirky :)
I should clarify... I think when he saw them they were reruns!
A lot of the shows of that era where *seriously* quirky mostly because they'd either never been done before or they where made on a minute budget. I loved the idea that The Magic Roundabout (one of my all time fave children's shows) was originally made in French but then bought for the British market with a completely independent voice over that had nothing to do with the original. SO trippy... [lol]
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