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SEEING THINGS - AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY |
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In 1958, Associated-Rediffusion asked Oliver Postgate to produce his children's series Alexander The Mouse using their marvellous, magnetic animation system. It didn't work, and unlike the stuff Emily brought to her shop, this time there were no mice to fix it. But that's something that we should all be grateful for, because Postgate and Oliver Firmin were forced to find another way of making their films, and that was Smallfilms. But Seeing Things is more than just the history of Smallfilms, it's the story of Postgate's life and he tells it in an extremely readable and enjoyable fashion. You can't fail to be entertained by his recollection of his North London childhood, how he was a conscientious objector in World War II, or the various jobs he had between the end of the war and the late 1950s when he stumbled into television. Of course, television is the main reason why we're all here, and more specifically the string of series that Postgate and Firmin produced throughout the 60s and 70s, including the likes of Ivor The Engine, Noggin The Nog, Clangers and Bagpuss. Only a handful of episodes of most of series were made, on budgets that barely scraped into three figures and filmed in a cowshed using whatever materials were at hand. This didn't stop the BBC rerunning them time after time, with Bagpuss still being shown a decade after it was initially filmed. Reading Seeing Things, it's difficult not to be struck by the huge changes in children's television over the last thirty years. There was very little of the commercial exploitation that we see with the likes of Teletubbies, and there was certainly no danger of falling over piles of Small Clanger toys on a trip to the toy shop. Perhaps this is why the holding company which held the rights to Ivor The Engine actually gave the rights back to Postgate so that he could remake the series for the BBC, such was their apparent delight that the series would be making a comeback. And then there's Bagpuss. Emily loved him, and so did everyone else according to the BBC poll that voted the series the Corporation's most popular children's TV programme of all time. Personally, I always thought Clangers was Smallfilms' finest hour, but there you go and, after all, it was the saggy old cloth cat who got the Postgate and Firmin their honorary MAs. There's plenty of background info about the various series in here, some familiar, some less so, and the book should be compulsory for anyone who grew up watching TV in the sixties and seventies - for those of you born too late, here's a chance to see some of what you missed. Just a shame about the lack of a Smallfilms filmography, but that's just a minor quibble really. A full score is rarely seen on any of our sites but it's fair to say that it's definitely justified in this case. Links: It's not 100% accurate, but the unofficial Smallfilms website can be found here. |
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