Oliver Postgate
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Oliver Postgate (born 1925) is the creator and writer of some of the most popular children's television programmes ever seen in Britain. Pogle's Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with Peter Firmin, and shown on the BBC between the 1950s and the 1970s. In a 1999 poll, Bagpuss was voted most popular children's programme of all time.
His father was Raymond Postgate and his mother Daisy Lansbury, making him the grandson of Labour politician, George Lansbury; some of whose principles he inherited, to the extent that he was prepared to go to prison as a conscientious objector during World War II, as his father had done in 1916.
Subsequently he did a number of different jobs, never really finding his niche until he entered into a collaboration with Firmin, who built most of the models used in the various animations. Setting up their business in a disused cowshed, Postgate and Firmin worked on children's programmes based on concepts and scripts which mostly originated with Postgate. He was also the narrator for all the Smallfilms productions, as well as for the WereBear story tapes, and his distinctive voice became familiar to generations of children.
The University of Kent awarded Postgate an honorary degree in 1987 and A Canterbury Chronicle, a tryptich by Postgate commissioned in 1990 hangs in the Great Hall of Eliot College on the University's Canterbury campus.
His autobiography, Seeing Things, was published in 2000.
External Links
- The Smallfilms Treasury (http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/)
- A Canterbury Chronicle (http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/campus/chronicle.html)