Читать книгу Seeing Things - Oliver Postgate - Страница 4

There is a period from early middle-age onwards when one is prone to become nostalgic about the childhood brand of sweets one ate in the playground and the kind of toys one played with in the bedroom: ooh, those Spangles, foaming shrimps and rice paper flying saucers – aah, good old Mousetrap, Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky. We remember too the intensity of concentration and ecstasy with which we watched television during what my generation is convinced was the Golden Age of children’s broadcasting: Rentaghost, Robinson Crusoe, Blue Peter and – above all, supremely above all – the masterpieces of Oliver Postgate, Pogle’s Wood, Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine.

From today’s perspective, when the smallest amount of success is recognised with instant celebrity and riches, it seems extra ordinary that Postgate and his partner at Smallfilms, Peter Firmin, could have penetrated, stimulated and entranced the minds and imaginations of so many generations of children and yet themselves have remained relatively anonymous. From what I know of Oliver Postgate, riches and celebrity were never his goal.

The story of how he and Firmin started Smallfilms and began their thirty year journey as storytellers is well told by Oliver in this wonderful autobiography. Few of his early contemporaries might have guessed that Oliver would become a children’s writer, puppeteer, artist and narrator and even fewer would have guessed that his career would provide such a contribution to the richness, comity and joy of Britain. He was either too modest or too unaware of the reach and importance of his programmes ever to vaunt his achievements, but they were inestimable.

The levels of charm, narrative pleasure, characterisation, wit and complete lack of condescension apparent in all of Postgate’s work were rare enough then; today they are all but extinct. During bouts of childhood theism, I always supposed that if God had a voice it would be that of Oliver Postgate, the same matchless blend of authority, kindliness and humour. And if Oliver was God then we were all inhabitants of the planet ‘far, far away where the Clangers live’, where we could also find the Soup Dragon, Noggin, Olaf the Lofty, Ivor, Professor Yaffle and Jones the Steam, not to mention that ‘old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams’ who starred in what was voted the best children’s programme of all time in a 1999 poll.

There are all kinds of ways of thinking about service: there is the kind Oliver never had truck with, military service, but, as he proved throughout his long, fulfilled life, it is possible to serve your country by inspiring its children and enriching its culture. There may be no medals struck for that, but there is the award of the abiding love and gratitude of millions.

Stephen Fry