Oliver Postgate
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2007
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the animator Oliver Postgate. As the creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss, Oliver holds a special place in many childhoods. So it may come as something of a surprise that he never thought about how his programmes would be received by children; instead he says he simply focussed on making the stories great - everything else was secondary. For 20 years he toiled in a converted pigsty in Kent, animating the characters Peter Firmin drew, churning out 120 seconds of film a day. He says a respectable average for an animation company now would be two seconds!
Oliver's own childhood was a lonely one; ignored by his busy parents and sent to an experimental school he hated. He says that to this day, he has no meaning unless he is doing something, and this is a direct legacy of his desperation to be noticed as a child.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: When the Saints Come Marching In by Pete Fountain Book: Huge book of English Poetry Luxury: A comfortable bed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.2 | The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is one of Britain's best loved animators Oliver Post, Oliver Postgate. As the creator of Iver the Engine, |
| 0:35.2 | Nogg in the Nogg and the Clangers, his films and voice have a special place at the heart |
| 0:39.7 | of countless childhoods. Indeed, his TV series Bagpoose was only a few years ago nominated |
| 0:45.5 | the best BBC children's programme of all time. An achievement made all the more exceptional |
| 0:50.9 | because only 13 episodes were ever produced and they were made in a |
| 0:54.8 | cow shed at a total cost of 700 pounds. |
| 0:58.4 | Yet the picture of Bagu's conjures of a cozy sepia tinted childhood is significantly at odds with its creator's |
| 1:05.0 | experience. |
| 1:06.5 | Brought up largely by a series of neglectful housemaids and plonked in a progressive boarding |
| 1:10.8 | school he hated, he says, I came to regard myself as a nuisance. |
| 1:15.6 | As a result, I suffer from a basic assumption that I am wrong. |
| 1:19.9 | So this insecurity, this feeling of not quite being worthy or belonging, that began very early. |
| 1:26.0 | Oh yes, it was almost like a sort of witch's gift. |
| 1:31.0 | I was led to believe right from the very route that somehow anything I thought of |
| 1:38.0 | was inherently wrong. |
| 1:40.0 | Just because I thought of it, so I then had to think of something even funnier and even cleverer than I would naturally think of in order to be there at all. |
| 1:50.0 | And it's quite absurd, I've only come to realize what it meant many many years later. |
| 1:55.0 | That's an incredible phrase, this witch's gift. |
| 1:57.5 | You describe it as what a sort of almost little curse that was thrown upon you. |
| 2:01.5 | Yes, it's a witch's gift is gifted, something that is inserted into your |
... |
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