On Noggin and Other Things

And when Mr Postgate went to sleep, all of his friends went to sleep too.

But everyone loved him.

Bye bye.

(From Hooplah on the comments to the Guardian article)

So sad to hear about Oliver Postgate. (A personal milestone reached as well because I think it is the first death of someone I have corresponded with via email). As well as all the usual memories of brilliant TV that people of my age have, there is the personal link in that my aunt was at school with him. I was intrigued to see that Professor Yaffle's voice was inspired by a meeting that Postgate had with Bertrand Russell as I am reasonably sure (weasel words wobert) that my aunt was at the same meeting. My first memory of Postgate/Firmin was Pogle's Wood which had a lovely small-is-beautiful feeling - a smoky Autumn atmosphere, small vilage life. As with all Postgate films, the strength is the feeling, the atmosphere conjured by the warm voice-over and the absoulutely-appropriate music. It encourages children to have a whole-picture view rather than a piecemeal affection for visual gymnastics. There will be no return to such TV, despite the view that current financial issues will make us all nicer people. TV these days has been genericised in such a way that you can create a whole animated series by drag-and-drop and application of style similar to the way that crosswords have been standardised and are defined by grid number and clue number from some anonymous database (probably Microsoft Access). Art is not about this and you could add this argument to the debate about what art actually is. Something can have the outward appearance of art and yet be just a machine-created collection of pixels. Art is the input of ideas and effort and this comes through the media in the same way that the warmth of a vinyl record maintains more of the emotion than a pure digital-to-digital transformation. The death of Oliver Postgate is a significant loss to emotional art and will hopefully add something to the debate about how Kids' TV these days is just about filling up the gaps between the adverts.