The Clangers (1969—70)

Oh, dammit, the bloody thing’s stuck again

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent

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If we look out at the night sky we can see millions of stars, and the stars we can’t see we can imagine. We can imagine them any colour and shape we like but, of course, we cannot hear them. This star for instance, this serene orb sailing forever through the silence of the sky. Does it ring with the music of the spheres? Or is it always silent? Or is it silent simply because, just now, the inhabitants are inside, safely asleep in their beds?

Who’s your friend?

The Clangers are an extended family of pink woollen moon mice who live inside a tiny, cratered planet. They move by stop-motion and communicate in the hooting glissando of swanee whistles. Sustained by daily deliveries from The Soup Dragon, they go about their projects of making weird contraptions for Major Clanger, all the while assaulted from without by constant interruptions of space debris, most often from that troublesome world, The Earth.

The Clangers was a TV show for kids created by a production company called Smallfilms. And these were small films: not just because they were short films for tiny children, but because the whole business was small. It consisted of two men — designer Peter Firmin and writer and narrator Oliver Postgate — crammed into a repurposed pig-shed in Kent and kitted out with a load of Meccano, some knitted puppets and a Bolex camera.

Smallfilms was already known for producing children’s shows. It had been responsible for Ivor the Engine (1959, remade in colour in the ‘70s; trains, Wales and small dragons), Noggin the Nog (1959—65; cardboard Norse sagas) and Pogle’s Wood (1965—68; stop-motion folk horror). Then, in 1969, the BBC approached Smallfilms to make something in colour, to help promote the new broadcasting technology. Postgate reached back to the ‘Moon Mouse’, a character from an episode of Noggin the Nog, and came up with The Clangers.

The show was deeply influenced by the Space Race of the late ‘60s and the moon landings. The Clangers’ tiny moon is deeply fanciful, riddled with seething soup wells and dotted about with musical trees, but it is constantly bombarded from out of the void by sharp-edged space-age technology, often of human design: satellites, probes, landers, objects of science intruding into the fantastical to probe and understand it. And, usually, to ruin it, until they’re shooed away again and everyday life can be restored.

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How did you meet?

I am almost precisely coeval with The Clangers. I was a couple of months old when the first episode was broadcast, and was thus the perfect age for the show. I am one of those Generation Xers for whom Oliver Postgate’s voice — gently serious, simultaneously authoritative and dreamy — is a formative sound: the voice of childhood, the voice of comfort, the voice of story itself. Postgate was our Pied Piper: we would have followed him anywhere and done anything he asked of us, not least because he asked nothing but for us to listen to a story. A story that would be slightly odd, but never frightening; unexpected, but never unnerving.

It’s ironic that the beginnings of The Clangers was so tied up with new technology and science, because the programme is deeply suspicious of all such things. The title Major Clanger — given to their their apparent leader — is surely a joke. (Non-Brits might find it useful to know that in British slang a ‘clanger’ is a mistake, and a ‘major clanger’ is a total balls-up.) The Major is constantly trying to invent space rockets and flying machines, and they are always major clangers. They fall apart; they knock Iron Chickens out of the firmament. These inventions are always bad ideas, and things are always better when they are put away and forgotten about.

At some point in the ‘90s we had an American visitor staying with us and we sat him down to watch a random episode of The Clangers. It was ‘The Intruder’, in which an Earth robot lands on the Clangers’ moon, prompting them to consider returning the favour by visiting Earth. Major Clanger tries to shake hands the robot, but what he thinks is an arm comes off in his grip and turns out to be a telescope. When the Clangers look through it they see New York City, the symbol of ‘60s America’s revolutionary restlessness and fervour:

NARRATOR
No, no. They don’t seem to like the look of that planet after all. Perhaps it would be best to… stay at home.

Having watched this, our visitor announced that he finally understood Britain.

There has been a twenty-first century reboot of The Clangers, narrated in the UK by Michael Palin and in the US by William Shatner. Palin — another voice revered by British Generation X — is the correct choice, but Shatner is surely wrong. The Captain of the USS Enterprise is precisely the sort of person who would land on the Clangers’ moon and start messing about with it, taking cuttings from the Music Trees and analysing the safety of the Soup Wells. 

Despite being set on an alien moon, this is not a show about outer space. It is a show about home. It manages to speak to both the innate imaginative curiosity of children and their instinctive conservatism: the urge to learn and the fear of the unknown, the desire to explore and the equal desire to go home again.

This is, perhaps, a product of Postgate’s own politics. A distant cousin of Angela ‘Murder She Wrote’ Lansbury, he was the grandson of Labour Party leader George Lansbury and grew up surrounded by (champagne) socialists. The suspicion of technology was perhaps the response of the traditional left to the new oppressive tools of global capitalism.

It is also the politics of its time. At the beginning of ‘The Intruder’, the Clangers are building something that the robot smashes into and destroys. The narrator describes it as ‘a sort of house’ but what it looks most like is Stonehenge. Like the strange folk magic of the subsequent Smallfilms series Bagpuss, The Clangers has some of that late ‘60s atavistic mistrust of technology. In that moment of scientific enthusiasm, as mankind was climbing into the heavens to touch the face of God, it was quietly revolutionary. It suggested that God might not want his face poked, and that we might more profitably spend our time and money worrying about the environment, sustainability and society.

There is a sly rebellion in the fabric of the show. Although the Clangers themselves speak entirely through the tootling of swanee whistles, Postgate wrote full scripts for him to base his whistling on. These scripts often included swearing, a matter that alarmed the BBC when they saw them. But the children wouldn’t hear the swearing, protested Postgate. But it would still be there, objected the BBC. Postgate went ahead and recorded it anyway and no one complained. Because no one knew. Not until the scripts were published at any rate.

So when the mechanical door to their underground lair gets stuck and Major Clanger complains: ‘Oh, dammit, the bloody thing’s stuck again’ (Postgate even wrote the ‘bloody’ as ‘B.’ in the script, so shocking was the word in 1968), it’s not just Postgate poking fun at the fallibility of technology; he’s also poking fun at the BBC. This is slightly unfair, of course. He himself said the BBC was a delight to work with, happily taking whatever Smallfilms produced, never asking them to pitch or consider commercial pressures. But then this fits with the conservative socialism of Postgate’s worlds: the patrician state-owned broadcaster doing what it thinks is best for the children of the nation.

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What kind of friend is it?

Delightful, obviously. The Clangers is cosy, but in strange and inventive ways. It’s no more strange than a lot of (excellent) children’s shows — Spongebob Squarepants, for instance, or Over The Garden Wall — but there is a particular synaesthetic aptness to all of The Clanger’s apparently whimsical choices. Space boats use not wind power but music power, wafting along on swelling notes; soup is the staff of life, forever bubbling in subterranean wells. These ideas fit, just as Postgate’s sesquipedalian, orotund language fits and Vernon Elliott’s plangent, piping music fits. It’s all very unusual, and possibly incomprehensible to childish ears. It invokes the alien nature of the setting but also highlights the homemade domesticity of the Clangers themselves. Against all the contemporaneous sententious speechifying about the vastness of the infinite, here are a bunch of pink woollen shrews eating string pie.

This home-made quality is its chief joy now. The Clangers had Meccano skeletons and their flesh was knitted by Peter Firmin’s wife. The stars were Christmas baubles; their moon was a football covered in plaster; the doors to their burrows were foil tops from milk bottles. The whole show was made from objects scrounged from the nonsense drawer in the kitchen and the bottom of the toy box. It was not only a world made for children; it could have been made by them.

Every episode starts with an introduction from Postgate. Often these introductions are invocations to imagine another world and what might populate it. At its most fundamental level the show requires the imaginative involvement of the viewer. We can’t understand the Clangers, with their weird whistling language; we, like the narrator, have to imagine what they are talking about.

This is the ultimate cosiness of The Clangers. It doesn’t ‘tell’ stories to children; it requires children’s involvement in the telling. It reassures them that they can imagine their own, that there is no idea too silly or too small. That among the forgotten bits and pieces scattered about the house, there are strange new worlds to discover.

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For more of the strange worlds offered to ‘70s children, try Rowan Davies on “Ballet Shoes”