They Live In Your TV

Right, let me get one thing absolutely straight from the start today.  I love Oliver Postgate and everything about him.  There, I said it.  The man was  - and is - a legend.  His work inspired a generation, and he did it all in a shed with a camera made of Meccano.

For those of you unlucky enough not to get the Postgate therapy as a child, Oliver was one half of Smallfilms, a production company which made animated children's programmes mainly for the BBC.  Throughout the 60s, 70s and early 80s, Smallfilms made some of the most memorable shows EVER.  This is the team that gave us Ivor the Engine, which is kind of like Samuel Beckett but nice and with dragons.  Noggin the Nog was Lord of the Rings with more cake involved.  Clangers was a NASA favourite and featured a fantastically huge amount of heavily disguised swearing.  And naturally, there was Bagpuss.  If you don't know Bagpuss - no, I can't even begin to describe it.  Except to say that it's a slightly sepia-toned gateway to a past where Pebble Mill at One was exciting and the spinning BBC globe was the sign that all was well with the world.  Bagpuss and Ivor are my Proustian delights, which is appropriate, seeing as how there was a character in Bagpuss called Madeline.  She's the only sentient ragdoll that I'm not scared off.  She's ace, in fact, as are all the other characters. 

"What's going on?"  whimpers my audience.  "He's not Ghost Transmissions at all.  This is some unicorn loving impostor.  No-one's tried to show their arse or anything.  There hasn't even been a character with no face.  I don't like it and I want my money back."

Well, firstly, you never paid to get in anyway.  You put a window through round the back and climbed in, first having chewed up an old ticket to make it look like a new one.  Secondly, stop whining.  See, Madeline wasn't scary.  But Oliver knew a thing or two about spooking his audience. 

Totally unrepresentative of a holistic wiccan lifestyle

There were clues early on.  One black and white stop-motion epic - Pogles Wood - featured a distinctly unnerving witch, with a habit of screaming a lot.  She scared the daylights out of the BBC who insisted on removing the character from future series*.  That seemed to be the last scary Smallfilm; however...

Oliver was famous for creating worlds.  This was how he viewed it; they were places in his imagination with their own geography and rules.  He just went there (mentally, unless there's a REALLY cool story we don't know here) and wrote down whatever was going on.  In the 1980s, however, he discovered that his ability to create worlds had grown a little thin; he describes this in his awesome autobiography, Seeing Things, suggesting that his muse gave him twelve complete worlds and that was his lot.  So, when he started adapting other people's worlds instead...well, it wasn't quite the same.

Rumer Godden was an author with quite a bibliography, and tucked away in that was a children's book called The Dolls' House.  There, in that one sentence, I've got half my audience back shuddering again already, haven't I?  The BBC commissioned Smallfilms to adapt this for the late afternoon/early evening slot.  Rumer has it - nah, got to stop that one, couldn't resist - that the author was initially frosty, but soon warmed to the Smallfilms style. 

The Dolls' House.  Clue is in the title.  Dolls are involved.  Five of them.  Yes, you're outnumbered.  Actually, they are quite nice in a creepy way; four of them live in a box, dreaming of a happier life when they might have a house to live in.  They get one.  They are happy and excited, they are gentle, naive creatures.  Tottie, Birdie, Mr Plantagenet and Apple.  Stop motion they may be, but this is still a Smallfilms production and things are vaguely comfortable...sort of.  It feels a bit uneasy, to be honest.

Yeah, I bet it does.  Cause this is when Marchpane turns up.  Jesus fucking Christ.

You can add your own caption.  I'm not staying on this bit a minute longer.  NB, they've got Tottie's name wrong.  She won't like that AT ALL.

Marchpane is a posh doll with a voice like a young Princess Margaret and an attitude that would make Machiavelli feel like he wanted a nice cup of tea with his Granny.  Marchpane don't like sharing the dolls' house.  Marchpane wants rid of the others.  In the same way that the Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter wants rid of those kids.  In fact, I think it best if you consider Marchpane to be the Reverend Powell of Childrens' BBC. 

Here then, for your education, is an episode.  Watch and consider.  Or don't.

You know how these things go.  She's going to connive.  She's going to set traps and whatnot.  She's going to be the classic kids' TV villain.  And they'll win out.  Good will triumph.  Yeah, it does.  Except that...well...

She kills one of the other dolls.  Actually, that's not quite accurate.

She burns one of them alive.

Right to fucking death there on camera at four o'clock in the afternoon on BBC1, just around home time from school.  And it's the really nice, trusting, positive one, Birdie.  At which point did the BBC think You know what we need?  A kids' version of The Wicker Man.  Aimed at nine year olds.  Belting plan, Jeremy old boy.


Oh, don't worry.  Evil will not triumph here.  No, not at all.  See, Marchpane, it turns out, is so nice and so antique and Princess Margarety that her owners decide she can't be played with and seal her up in a dark box.  Dolls, by the way, are always sentient, but powerless.  People can choose, but dolls can only be chosen runs the script, making me wonder if Ayn Rand was involved somewhere.  So, if you consider for a moment: after having immolated a saintly mother-figure, Marchpane gets effectively buried alive.  Eternally aware.  Sealed in a box.  For the rest of time.  The end.  Happy fucking viewing, kiddies. Instant Karma and all that, but no-one smart enough to think it through is going to enjoy their tea after that.

Smallfilms wound up operations not long after; I think they have one more series to their name.  And as I said at the start, I will never, ever defame the life and work of Oliver Postgate; the man was a genius in more than one field, lived a life of adventure and strangeness and had the best bedtime story voice in the entire universe, more so even than the Ashtar Command.  But I think I'll stick to the worlds he created himself.  There were dragons in Oliver's own worlds, you see.  They lived in the chestnut barrel.  I much prefer that.

Idris.  AWESOME.

*But not from the Pogles books, where she gets all metafictional.  She gets turned into a wood and plaster model, with glass eyes, which is exactly what she was in real life.  I may have read too much Grant Morrison, but there are all kinds of spooky overtones to that.