Feature: Exhibition - Toy Tales: Highlights from Classic British Children’s Animation - Cartoon Museum

Published: 08 July 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THEY worked from a shed in a farmyard in Kent – and created a cottage industry that was to change the face of children’s TV forever.

Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate were the artists and animators behind such BBC classics as Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Pingwings. 

And while these  shows were completely animated, if you look carefully, you can find the two creators hidden in them: this is because Noggin the Nog and his best friend Thornodson remind Peter of himself and his friend Oliver. Now original artwork used in this and a host of other children’s series is the subject of a new exhibition opening this week at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury.

Noggin and his friends were based on the Lewis chessmen, the set discovered on the Isle of Lewis that dates from the 12th century.

“I saw them in the British Museum,” recalls Peter, who is still working as an artist and is due to show an exhibition of his prints in Whitstable this summer. “I was struck by them, by their classical looks.”

In his mind’s eye, they became the fearless Viking adventurers who, as any one of a certain age will recall, lived “in the lands of the North, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale...”

“Noggin, in my mind, was Oliver Postgate,” he says. “It means I am rather fond of both of these characters.”

Oliver passed away five years ago, but the exhibition has plenty reminders of how the pair played off each another to create a whole new world for children’s TV. 

Peter had never thought of going into making shows and when Oliver first approached him, he was disdainful. He had trained at the Central School of Art  and then settled down as a freelance illustrator. 

He recalls the 1950s being a hard time to earn a living this way.

“Oliver Postgate came to see me,” he says. “I was struggling to make a living, when this gentleman came by and asked me to draw pictures for a show called Alexander the Mouse.

“I was reluctant, because TV in those days was frankly rubbish.”

However, a fee of £30 a week to work on the show helped him decide and soon he was enthralled by the process of making animated stories. This was a far cry from the days of Tele­tubbies, with it’s fantastic budget, or In the Night Garden, with Derek Jacobi reading the script.

“These were the days of live TV,” he says.

“Oliver had written some stories and they had some animation. It was done in a rather dangerous manner – we used magnets to move things across the back­grounds,” he says. “The animation process was very chaotic. Things were always jumping about and doing the wrong thing.”

But the pair soon decamped to Oliver’s farmhouse in Kent, and from a shed turned studio, some of the most recognisable characters in British TV history were born. “Me and Oliver were quite an industry at the time,” Peter recalls of the sheer number of episodes they created. And he roped in his family mem­bers to help: his daughter Emily became Emily in Bagpuss – the human star of the old shop where the saggy cloth cat lives – while his wife made the Clangers. He built wire skeletons and she knitted their skins.

The exhibition also features the work of others: Plasticine heroes Morph and Wallace and Gromit feature, as do Danger Mouse, Peppa Pig and Bob The Builder.

And it also underlines how Peter and Oliver’s work continues to charm today. Peter believes the secret behind the continuing attraction of the likes of Bagpuss is not simply down to nostalgia. “The fact is we told are good stories,” he says. “We did not know, of course, when we were making it 36 years ago that Bagpuss would still be watched and popular. There must be something about it.”

His daughter Emily has offered an explanation. “She says it is because it is a child in their own story,” he says. “There are no adults about to get in the way.”

• Toy Tales: Highlights from Classic British Children’s Animation is at the Cartoon Museum,
35 Little Russell Street, WC1, from July 7-Sep­tember 5, 020 7580 8155, www.cartoonmuseum.org