Rather nervously I asked Ursula Eason of the BBC what they objected to in the scripts. She replied: “The bad language.”
I could only think of one piece of bad language. One of the episodes begins with Major Clanger trying to open the big sliding doors of the main cave mouth. It jams and his first line is:
“Oh sod it! The bloody thing’s stuck again!”
“That’s it.” said Ursula. “You know quite well we can’t say things like that on childrens’ programmes.”
“But .. ” I said, “they don’t say it. They whistle it.”
“But surely people will know?”
“If they have nice minds they will hear him say ‘Oh dear me. The naughty thing is jammed again.’”
“Oh, all right then, I suppose so, but please keep the language moderate.”
Now we’d started the tape by this point and I read the above to Sarah – and seconds later, that very scene comes up on the screen. Wonderfully coincident.
Oliver Postgate is the presiding genius, along with designer Peter Firmin, at Smallfilms, which created Clangers films between 1969 and 1972. Smallfilms also made Bagpuss, the Pogles, Noggin the Nog and others. Through an ecommercial entity called The Dragon’s Friendly Society, a good selection of the Smallfilms canon is available on video, and possibly even DVD by now, which is definitely a good thing.
Oliver Postgates voice is one of the most beautiful sounds in the universe. I can hardly begin to tell how deep that voice goes in my memory, but the effect on me is like being wrapped up in a big warm blanket after a hard day, and taken home. One time in the eighties I tried in vain to persuade one magazine editor or another to let me interview O.P. – but I got a lot of bllank looks when I talked about the emotional psychology of voices, as relating to storytelling for children, via mass media… bwoy, would I have treasured that tape, had it ever come into existence.
