"Seeing Things" by Oliver Postgate

If it is charm that you seek, then celebrate with me the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Oliver Postgate (1925-2008), a man whose voice is very well-known and remembered with much affection by generations of British people due to its very frequent presence on the children’s television programmes we all watched in infancy.

He was responsible for Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, The Pogles, Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss among others. He wrote the scripts, supervised the animation and provided most of the narration too. In 2000 he wrote a warm-hearted autobiography called 'Seeing Things' in which he described how, when doing casual stage management work at the BBC, he first started producing his own television shows:

"While I had been doing a stint on children's programmes, I had come to see that quite a lot of the material that was being sent out was pretty thin stuff, just about adequate to fill the time. So, on the basis that I probably couldn't do a lot worse, I sat down one morning in 1958 and took pencil and paper to write a story series for children's television."

Soon afterwards he was paired up with Peter Firmin who went on to design all the backdrops and create the puppets they worked with. He was also responsible for the famous Basil Brush puppet. They worked together from a large garden shed for almost thirty years having formed a company called 'SmallFilms' which continues to operate.

Oliver was the grandson of George Lansbury, the first leader of the Labour Party, and a nephew of the leading left-wing intellectual, Margaret Cole. He was politically active for most of his life, particularly in the anti-nuclear movement, and his thinking often found its way into his TV shows, albeit in a very subtle, sweetly nostalgic and charming way.