The Clangers
Monday-Friday, 5.30pm, CBeebies
But wait. Listen. What's this?
"...If, in our imaginations, we turn away from the Earth and think about other planets, other, less-fortunate stars, we realise that life there might be very different. Very bleak and dull. The solitary fisher, setting off to catch what she can in the vast empty spaces of the universe, may feel very much alone..."
The lines come not from some cosmic-poetic Ray Bradbury story, but from a 1970 episode of The Clangers, and they are best appreciated when you hear them spoken by the man who wrote them, Oliver Postgate, who had the kindliest, wisest, slyest and closest voice on television, and who made the best ever television for children, because he did it knowing we are all children.
Many of us carry Clangers with us the way we do DNA, so it can be startling to realise how few episodes Postgate and his partner in genius, Peter Firmin, actually made about the pink knitted creatures with mouse ears and anteater snouts who shared that tiny, lumpy grey planet with the Soup Dragon. It takes two men in a shed many hours to do stop-motion animation, and only 26 woolly 10-minute epics were produced between 1969 and 1972.
Since then, in the vast empty spaces of the universe, there has been only silence. Postgate died in 2008, may hosts of swanee whistles sing him to his rest.
But wait. Listen. What's this?
"...This is the Earth. A tiny, wet planet, lost and alone in the vast silence of space..."
We are not alone. The Clangers have returned.
I am obliged to say the new series is not quite The Clangers of old; but, as you can perhaps tell from the way I am lying helpless on my back kicking my feet in the air, this doesn't matter. It is splendid.
The differences recall those between the new Poldark and its 1970s incarnation: essentially, the new series is friendlier. Instead of the cold, empty black void of the original, the endless space surrounding the Clangers' little homeworld is now a warm wash of vibrant blues. More pertinently, in the storytelling, there is nothing as pointed as the parables Postgate smuggled in. The old episode I quoted above was basically an anti-money treatise, in which Tiny Clanger is blinded by greed and goes into paranoid seclusion. Tiny's dilemma in the first of these new episodes is gentler: just as she's composed a lovely little tune, a strong wind blows the notes off the music trees, and she has to find them.
If the new series doesn't push like the 1970s, however, stubborn traces of Postgate's handmade spirit still linger, largely because it is overseen by his son, Daniel, who also has the 86-year-old Firmin on board. It is heartening, for instance, to see two tales this week expounding the philosophy that, actually, replacing everybody with machines is not a great idea. Bracing, too, in a show for teenies, to hear the narrator utter phrases like "...lost and alone in the vast silence..."
Ah, yes. The narrator. It is a perfect Michael Palin, eternal as the galaxy, soothing as The Hitchhiker's Guide: hearing him is like being wrapped in a big, warm, fluffy towel straight from the bath.
Don't Panic. Clangers are back, and they are calm, busy, mad and bright, crabby and gracious, gorgeous, sweet and strange and, above all, still Clangers. Consider this: the BBC is once again employing knitters. That's a planet I want to live on.
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