Oliver Postgate

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

"Postgate's work is deep inside me and I think that's true for so many of my generation...His work represents nothing less than a touchstone for our national imagination and in that sense it's profoundly important"

Andrew Davenport, writer, composer, and creator of Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, nominates Oliver Postgate, who, along with his Smallfilms business partner, the artist Peter Firmin, invented the children's television shows Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and, perhaps most loved of all, Bagpuss.

Postgate was a late bloomer. Following Dartington school (which he hated) a stint in jail and working the land, several odd jobs and even odder inventions, he eventually discovered a love of stop-motion animation and created some of the most enduring worlds and best-loved characters in television, all from a cowshed in Kent.

Including clips of his programmes, contributions from singer and musician Sandra Kerr. and archive from Postgate's 2007 Desert Island Discs interview.

With cultural historian Matthew Sweet. Produced by Ellie Richold. Presented by Matthew Parris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:07.3	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron.
0:10.5	Evil genius.
0:11.6	He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it.
0:15.5	That's like hiding at your own funeral.
0:17.1	Yeah, a bit great gig.
0:18.6	I'm Russell Kane.
0:19.6	Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:43.1	If you're a listener of a certain age, there's a good chance that this will take you back.
0:55.5	Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Emily.
1:01.7	That's the warm, comforting voice of Oliver Postgate, our subject today.
1:07.1	Postgate's soothing narration accompanied many children's television shows between 1958 and 1972, beginning with either the engine and ending with the clangers.
1:13.6	But he was not only the voice, he was also the writer and animator of these programmes.
1:18.6	The most important, the most beautiful, the most magical?
1:33.2	The most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world was, of course, Bagpuss, which is regularly voted the best children's TV programme of all time.
1:40.4	And it's from the world of children's television that our guest comes to.
1:45.5	Andrew Davenport, the writer and musical mind behind In the Night Garden and Moon and me,
1:51.9	and the co-creator of the double BAFTA-winning telitubbies.
1:55.9	Andrew, et-oh.
1:58.0	E-oh.
2:00.0	What is it about Postgate, Oliver Postgate?
2:04.4	Well, there's nobody else that I can think of whose work has so profoundly inspired me from my earliest childhood right up to my adult professional life.
	...

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