It’s easy to wallow in the nostalgic belief that things were better in the old days, a simpler, more innocent time. Rose-tinted nostalgia is just as selective as the belief that everything in the past was terrible, a concept that you’ll see floated on every desperately of-the-moment website and news service. The truth is a more awkward bugger – much of the past was indeed awful and a place that we should be glad to be rid of. But not all of it. Sometimes, we can see that the world left behind is a gentler, kinder, less nakedly commercial one – the very world that we are often told is something to aspire to now.
Modern-day children’s entertainment is dominated by the relentless desire to appeal to the right demographics and the belief that kids today are too ‘sophisticated’ for the simple pleasures of the past. Kids today, we are told, are no longer satisfied by gentle pleasures and hand-crafted toys – they need a bombardment of sound and vision, noise and fury. How true this is remains open to question – it’s not as though there is any evidence to support this apparent new level of sophistication beyond the fact that they are only offered the entertainment that producers have decided they need, a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Like the claims that ‘no one’ buys DVDs or CDs anymore or determined media campaigns that push food fads as though everyone, rather than small groups of trend-obsessives, are into them, the claims that modern children will somehow only be satisfied by high-speed editing, hyperactive visuals and shouty dialogue are accepted because that is all that they are offered. Yet when given an alternative, modern kids quite often prove to be just as enthralled by the past. You could almost suspect that the immediate dismissal of these old shows is more a parental problem than a juvenile one. But in an era when Slow TV is hyped as a much-needed curative for an increasingly stressful world, these little bursts of relaxation seem increasingly vital.
When we think of quiet, not-much-happening children’s TV, the go-to reference is Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Smallfilms, a company that seemed to define the ramshackle, hand-crafted nature of the genre at the time. Literally running out of a garden shed, Smallfilms made the gentlest of gentle TV – even when the shows were ostensibly adventure-based, like Noggin the Nog, the levels of ‘mild threat’ (as the BBFC might say) were very mild indeed, and Postgate’s warm voice on the narration was always a reassuring presence – his gentle tones, with a touch of humour and a smidgen of knowing sarcasm for the watching parents, made everything feel safe – his voice is the sound of childhood innocence. Notably, a 1982 revival of the animated Noggin the Nog was curtailed by BBC executives who worried that it was old-fashioned.
Noggin the Nog had a primitive stop-motion animation style using cardboard cut-out figures with limited movement. The same technique was also used on the Smallfilms series Ivor the Engine, a show with a longer shelf-life that was first made in 1958 and was later revived in 1975 to fulfil the requirements of colour TV. Ivor the Engine is a tale of a Welsh steam railway that was of the moment when the original series was made but already nostalgic when revived. Ivor was a possibly sentient steam engine and there was a supporting cast of characters like engine driver Jones the Steam, Dai Station and other Welsh stereotypes. In keeping with later Smallfilms productions, not much happens – there are moments of drama and unusually for a five-minute episode children’s series, there is continuity between instalments of the later series, sometimes forming a longer story. The series is probably less beloved – or well remembered – than later Smallfilms shows, perhaps because the animation style is a little clunkier, perhaps because the characters are rather less interesting. But the odd, prosaic soap opera narrative that ran through many episodes would prove to be a precursor of three other children’s TV shows that emerged in the late 1960s and would be re-run into the 1980s (when, of course, they were given the push for being too old-fashioned).
Camberwick Green, Chigley and Trumpton were as close to soap operas for kids as animated TV came. Eschewing any fantastic elements, the three shows created by Gordon Murray took place in an inter-connected world, the fictional country of Trumptonshire. Camberwick Green (1966) is set in the titular small village and the surrounding area (such as Pippin Fort, where decidedly old-fashioned soldier boys are trained) and farmland. Chigley (1969) is a somewhat larger village nearby, home to a few factories as well as village shops and local craft businesses. Trumpton (1967) is the local market town, where the regional infrastructure – the local council and Mayor, the fire station – reside. There is also the town/city of Wellchester, which is the largest urban location of Trumptonshire, often mentioned but rarely seen.
All three shows use the same stop-motion style, making them feel inter-connected – while crossovers between the shows are few, it’s made clear that they all exist in the same world, at the same time. Brian Cant’s pitch-perfect narration on all three shows provides another link. Each series is populated by a collection of local characters, with each story tending to focus on one of them, with Cant singing a song relating to them midway through the 15-minute episode – though each show sees interaction between several villagers. Very little really happens – the stories are based around minor problems that need solving and even when there is a fire in one episode, it’s not especially worrying – this is not a soap opera that kills off half its characters in a blazing inferno.
As the episodes were longer, the Trumptonshire trilogy was a tad more awkward to schedule – I remember it being a lunchtime series when I first saw it but it seemed to pop around the schedules. It’s a collection of shows that are full of iconic characters and title sequences, with enough repetition to keep the kids engaged – the fire brigade roll-call of “Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb” is probably burned into the collective memory of several generations. Despite the fact that nothing actually happens most of the time and the narratives are only a step away from social realism (albeit in an idealised version of rural England), there’s a charm to these shows that hasn’t dated. This is rather ironic – the more fashionable, ‘sophisticated’ shows that BBC commissioning editors decided kids were demanding from the 1980s onwards have aged rather more dramatically than these shows, which felt old-fashioned even at the time that they were made. All three shows feature an idealised, homogenous English countryside – everyone is white, everyone is straight (presumably – the show doesn’t feel the need to make a statement about sexuality) and I’m guessing that everyone is conservative with both a small and large C. Don’t hold your breath waiting for mainstream TV re-runs any time soon.
While the Trumptonshire trilogy has been put on the shelf, a pair of Smallfilms series remains amongst the most beloved British TV shows of all time. Both share the same cosy style and nostalgic idealism as Gordon Murray’s shows but within that, allow a more inclusively fantastical and eccentric narrative to be explored. Clangers and Bagpuss are the epitome of gentle humour but contain enough magical unreality to enthral kids and adults alike.
Clangers – usually but erroneously referred to as The Clangers, though the definite article is notably absent from the opening and closing titles – is a show of its time, in the sense that it came in the wake of the Moon landing and ‘something about outer space’ was pretty much the only requirement from the BBC when commissioning the show from Smallfilms. Set on a ridiculously small planetoid – not, as some have said, the Moon, though the planet of the Clangers is clearly based on it – Clangers is another show in which very little happens, though compared to the Trumptonshire trilogy or the later Bagpuss, it is awash with incident. The Clangers – a small group of pink creatures who look like a cross between a pig and a mouse – live on their tiny planet in underground caves, and each episode sees them interacting with characters or objects that arrive from the depths of space. They live on soup – provided by the rather put-upon Soup Dragon – and Blue String Pudding, and are a kind-hearted, if sometimes grumpy bunch.
The curious thing about the show – something that you only really notice when watching the episodes back-to-back in chronological order, something that was not the viewing experience for most people watching on TV over the years – is that it has a continuing story that runs from episode to episode. The first season is essentially one long narrative, broken into individual moments but effectively forming a single piece in which new characters are introduced and then become a part of the story. These include the Iron Chicken, an excitable mechanical bird that lives in a nest of scrap somewhere above the planet of the Clangers, the Froglets – a trio of orange, smiling mischief makers who pop out of a top hat – Baby Soup Dragon (and later Baby Iron Chicken) and the Music Trees, whose magical notes provide the means of powering the space boat used by Small Clanger and Tiny Clanger on their celestial fishing expeditions where passing bits of space debris are caught using a magnet at the end of a fishing line. The show’s use of colour – brightly-hued flowers, the lurid green of the soup wells, the bright pink Clangers themselves – combines perfectly with the barren landscape of the planet’s exterior and the cold metal objects that are occasionally found floating through space.
In common with the other Smallfilms productions discussed here (and British children’s TV in general for decades), the show is narrated – as usual by Postgate – but each character has their own dialogue. The voices of the Clangers – high-pitched whistles – became something immediately recognisable, imitated by kids and adults alike, while the Soup Dragon’s gurgling voice was also much copied. While Postgate was on hand to translate, you could more or less understand what each character was saying – at least, you’d get the gist of it. It allowed the show to strip back the narration and let the characters develop their own personalities, even as the story was explained with gentle humour by Postgate.
When I said that the show was packed with incident, I think we should be clear that this was hardly high drama. The stories had more to do with problem-solving and relationship-building than anything else – the Clangers would encounter some alien object, perhaps rebuild it and then perhaps have a brief moment of chaos – the Iron Chicken eating its way through the planet, the Hoot being a noisy annoyance – before everything is dealt with amicably. There’s enough to add a touch of drama to the story but never something scary or worrying – no matter what happened, friendly figures were on hand to help. This is a strange and unfamiliar world, but there is nothing here that is designed to disturb or confuse. There’s something comforting and relaxing about the show, from Postgate’s note-perfect narration – knowing when to speed it up, when to slow it down with consummate skill – to the clunky but effective stop-motion that animates each character. The show takes a few quiet digs at the hectic, industrial life on Earth – Postgate’s opening spiel usually starts with Earth and then takes us to the more simple world of the Clangers, while an early episode sees the arrival of a TV set – still, remarkably, picking up live-action footage of politicians and pop stars – that is soon sent packing as a noisy and unwelcome visitor. A few episodes see space probes and astronauts from Earth arriving on the planet – these are greeted with more politeness, though there is little mutual understanding.
Clangers is the show that has the longest life of all the Smallfilms productions, with a new series in the 2010s and a secure place in pop culture – even when the show was new, it was referenced in Doctor Who and the characters appeared in an amusing 1974 General Election public information film (once thought lost, now included on the Blu-ray edition). But the show that still gets the most love remains Bagpuss. Running for just thirteen episodes in 1974, Bagpuss has become a part of the collective British consciousness, a series that epitomises the gentle pleasures of a lost television world. The show has remained popular not simply because of nostalgia but because it feels almost hypnotically relaxing. Bagpuss Blu-rays should be available on prescription for people suffering from anxiety and the show provides a much-needed escape from the angry, competitive world that we are otherwise surrounded by.
The premise of the show is simple – Emily (who seems to be a child in the Victorian age, though it is never quite certain) somehow or other owns a shop that doesn’t sell anything. Instead, she finds broken things and brings them for Bagpuss and his friends to repair. Bagpuss, a rather tatty cloth cat, comes magically to life, and when he wakes up, so do his friends – the excitable mice from the mouse organ, the irascible Professor Yaffle, ragdoll Madeline and Gabriel the toad. Over the course of the episode, they work out what the broken item is, share related stories and songs and repair it. And that’s it. There’s no threat, no drama, no real conflict (Professor Yaffle is a tad condescending and bossy, but that’s as argumentative as the show gets), just… charm.
Like Clangers, Bagpuss is a stop-motion animated show with puppets, the animation being crude enough to somehow add to the charm – I dread the possibility of someone making a modern CGI version of the show because even a cel-animation version of this series would not have worked. It needs the rough, basic, rather hand-made feel – like Bagpuss himself, the show is “baggy and a bit loose at the seams”, and that’s exactly what it needs to be. We don’t watch Smallfilms productions for their high technical quality.
Interestingly though, the show is probably not without its challenges for modern audiences. In the first episode, we are told a story about mermaids, illustrated by hand-drawn images – of topless mermaids, complete with nipples. It probably didn’t raise an eyebrow in 1974 but now might cause some parents to blow a gasket. In a world where a bare breast is seen as pornographic, this innocent display ought to be a sobering corrective – but I suspect that it is a scene that would now be removed from any re-runs of the show.
Bagpuss was the last great Smallfilms series – while the company made a few more shows into the mid-1980s, none are well remembered or loved. Times had changed and the probability of a show like this making it onto TV was low. That’s still the case – even though Bagpuss and Clangers remain beloved series, they are still seen as dated. The updated Clangers series from a revived Smallfilms run by Oliver Postgate’s son used digital animation and while it was a reasonable facsimile of the original, it didn’t quite have the same eccentric charm. But I say that as a jaded old man – perhaps it spoke to young kids in a way that the original couldn’t. Though if that was the case, why remake it to begin with?
I assume that the audience for the recently-issued Blu-ray collections of these old shows will be the people who grew up with them when they were on TV. That’s understandable enough. But I would hope that they will be introducing their kids to the quiet pleasures of these series. We’re told that children are leading increasingly stressful lives, full of the pressures of the modern world. These old shows – even the ones that offer a very culturally monochromatic view of society – feel like the ideal way to ease that sense of stress. Perhaps the whizz-bang, in-your-face, over-stimulation nature of kids TV today isn’t all that helpful. These Smallfilms might just be the curative that all generations need.
DAVID FLINT
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I was fortunate to be a young child during this golden era of Children’s TV (and a golden era for TV as a whole), and it was so refreshing to see such classic programmes as described to be methodically paced and written to allow a story to be told, in spite of the technical limitations of the time of sound and animation which gives it a gentle charm that will never date, with simple,streamlined musical songs as accompaniment that also work perfectly in such a context.
Other honorable mentions of this period should include Bod, Captain Pugwash, Mary Mungo and Midge ( the last two made by John Ryan), The Herbs,.Crystal Tipps and Alastair (animated in splashy psychedelic colour), and those dubbed European series such as Robinson Crusoe, White Horses, and The Flashing Blade among many others.
I find TV of all kinds unwatchable now; too slick,too hollow, too soulless, bombastic, exhausting to watch with irritating CGI type special effects,over emphatic soundtracks and frantic editing. The 50th anniversary of Bagpuss being first broadcast was widely marked,remembered and celebrated a month or two back and deservedly so. Virtually all TV series broadcast now will be forgotten after 50 minutes,if they’re lucky.
I had initially intended to do a piece covering the whole of children’s TV of the era – the shows you mention, things like Pipkins etc – but it became too cumbersome to work as a single article. So expect more anon. There’s probably a book in it, though I’ll probably leave someone else to write that.