Bagpuss Animation Characters

 

Bagpuss was devised and created by the brilliant minds of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, who also created Noggin The Nog, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and Pogle's Wood.

Oliver Postgate wrote Bagpuss and provided some of the voices. Peter Firmin said: “I created the visual character of Bagpuss after I had the idea of a cat with visible thoughts, but it was Oliver who breathed life into the creation by supplying his thoughts and voice”.

Bagpuss was first shown in 1974 in Watch With Mother . Although only 13 episodes were made, the programme was so popular that the series was repeated 27 times to successive generations.

Emily, the little girl whose shop Bagpuss lived in, was played by Peter Firmin's seven year old daughter. Emily is now a 37-year-old artist living in Whitstable , Kent.

Emily Firmin said: “The magic of Bagpuss was that children want to be like Emily and live in a world surrounded by puppets rather than adults”.

In the series Emily would find a discarded object that needed repairing and bring it to Bagpuss. She would sing to wake him and his friends – the Mice on the Mouse Organ, Madeleine the ragdoll, Gabriel the toad and Professor Yaffle, the distinguished old woodpecker. Whenever Emily found something that needed repairing Bagpuss would listen as his friends identified, discussed and repaired the object.

Professor Yaffle thought himself the brains of the organisation, Gabriel lived on a tin and played his banjo, Madeleine never moved out of her wicker chair, and the six Mice played the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ.

In 1999 Bagpuss was named the country's favourite BBC children's programme of all time, beating off the challenge of modern TV programmes such as the Teletubbies. A telephone poll for a tribute programme to the BBC's children's output, called Are you Sitting Comfortably , shown on New Years day, saw Bagpuss attract a phenomenal 40,000 votes.

Today Bagpuss is as fresh in the minds of his original fans, and of successive generations who have embraced him, as he was all those years ago. A true British classic which will always hold a special place in the heart of the nation.

Bagpuss and the mice

The program would open with a narrated series of sepia tinted still photos, showing Emily (played by animator Peter Firmin's daughter Emily), a little girl who would find lost and broken things. She would take them home to Bagpuss's shop, and before she went away, she sang a little rhyme to Bagpuss (the most important, beautiful, magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world):

Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss
Old Fat Furry Catpuss
Wake up and look at this thing that I bring
Wake up, be bright, be golden and light
Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing

And she went away. Then Bagpuss would wake up, with a tremendous yawn, and the program shifted from sepia photographs to colour stop motion, revealing Bagpuss' stripes to be a startling fluorescent pink. And when Bagpuss woke up, all his friends woke up too, and various toys in the shop came to life: Gabriel the Toad and a rag doll called Madeleine. The wooden woodpecker bookend became Professor Yaffle, and the mice carved on the side of the mouse organ scurried around. Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner provided the voices of Madeleine and Gabriel respectively; all the other voices (including the narrator) were by Oliver Postgate.

The toys would discuss what the new object was; someone (usually Madeleine) would tell a story related to the object (shown in an animated thought bubble over Bagpuss's head), usually with a song, which would be accompanied by Gabriel on the banjo (which often sounded a lot more like a guitar), and then the mice, singing in high pitched squeaky harmony as they worked, would mend the broken object. The new thing would be put in the Shop window, so that whoever had lost it would see it as they went past, and could come in and claim it.

Then Bagpuss would start yawning again, and as he fell asleep the narration returned and all the toys reverted: Professor Yaffle once again became a bookend, the mice turned back to carvings on the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ, and Bagpuss became, once again, just a saggy old cloth cat: baggy, and a bit loose at the seams.
But Emily loved him.
Most of the stories and songs used in the series are based on folk songs and fairy tales from around the world.

Episodes

The titles of the thirteen episodes each refer in some way to the object Emily found.
The Ship in a Bottle - "Where would it sail to?",
The Owls of Athens - A dirty rag that reveals a picture once cleaned,
The Frog Princess - assorted jewels, which initially are thought to represent a cat and mouse but which Gabriel decides were the crown jewels of a frog princess,
The Ballet Shoe - put to inventive use by the mice,
The Hamish - a tartan pin cushion,
The Wise Man - a broken figurine of a Chinaman, claimed by Yaffle to be the very wise Ling-Po,
The Elephant - missing its ears,
The Mouse Mill - demonstrated by the mice to make chocolate biscuits out of butterbeans and breadcrumbs. This turns out to be a fraud,
The Giant - a statuette,
Old Man's Beard - a tangly plant,
The Fiddle - which plays itself,
Flying - a basket which the mice attempt to turn into a flying machine,
Uncle Feedle - a piece of cloth, decided to be a house for a rag doll.