Oliver Postgate: nice man but his work is overrated, shock horror (children’s television)

Straying off the usual topics. I’m sorry to hear about the death of Oliver Postgate, especially because he always seemed such a nice person. I ought to be able to join the chorus of people saying how wonderful his and Peter Firmin’s programmes were, but to tell the truth I was never particularly keen on Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Pogle’s Wood or the Clangers (I was a bit too old by the time Bagpuss came out).

I think the feeling I got from all of these was that somehow there was a grown-up talking down to me in an ironic, quizzical way, and I didn’t like it. I much preferred Camberwick Green / Trumpton / Chigley. (I switched on the radio a few months ago and heard someone talking about the “genius of Cant”, and thought he was talking about the great Brian, until I realised that he was talking about Kant.).

Most of the discussion of Postgate’s merits assumes the conventional wisdom that all children television nowadays is “dumbed down”. That’s rubbish (IMHO). For example, the surreal, slightly unsettling beauty of “In the Night Garden” is miles better than anything Smallfilms ever produced. Agreeable and intelligent though their programmes may have been, they never invented, for example, any character as complexly weird as Makka-Pakka.