News that the classic children’s TV show Bagpuss is to be given the full film treatment doesn’t bode well for fans of the original series, which ran from February to May 1974. Set in an old-fashioned bric-a-brac shop, each of the 13 episodes featured the eponymous ‘saggy cloth cat’ and his eccentric friends poring over an object delivered to the shop by a little girl named Emily.
In a world where brash, epilepsy-inducing cartoons have become the norm, you’d think a whimsical tale about a stuffed cat rifling through detritus might seem old hat to hyped-up, instantly gratified youngsters. But you’d be wrong. Seventies children’s classics such as Basil Brush, Trumpton and The Clangers have reached new audiences by way of YouTube, proving that children are far more discerning than today’s coarsened content gives them credit for. As far back as 1999 a BBC poll voted Bagpuss the nation’s favourite children’s programme of all time. Nine years later the cat that Emily loved topped a poll to find the country’s favourite children’s TV animal.
I showed my five-year-old some episodes recently and was heartened by her reaction. She particularly enjoyed the one where Bagpuss muses over the origins of an old ballet slipper. In another episode ‘Badpuss’ (as my daughter calls him) and his eclectic friends are seen trying to work out how a toy ship ended up inside a bottle. Rather than rolling her eyes, my daughter seemed utterly transfixed by the show’s odd collection of characters that includes a chorus of singing mice, a bossy rag doll named Madeleine, Professor Yaffle, a scholarly woodpecker based on Bertrand Russell, and a banjo-playing toad. To the uninitiated, this might all sound like the work of a deranged hippy, but to my inquisitive five-year-old, who trusts her vivid imagination much more than cold, hard logic, it made perfect sense.
Months later my little girl still delights in impersonating Professor Yaffle’s Russellesque chuckle whenever she catches me doing something silly. The other day one of the legs fell off her sausage dog toy and she immediately broke into a rendition of the ‘Mouse Round Mending Song’, complete with high-pitched rodent-like vocals: ‘we will find it, we will bind it, we will stick it with glue, glue, glue’.
The source material is about as un-film-like as you can imagine. The series belongs on the small screen given it is set within the confines of a shop; it was absolutely of its time and should be left as a charming period piece that also happily resonates with children across the ages.
Seventies children’s classics such as Basil Brush, Trumpton and The Clangers have reached new audiences by way of YouTube
Although the script is still in development, producers say the film version will be a mixture of live action and animation. This already feels wrong – so much of the original’s charm lay in the homemade judderiness of its stop-motion puppetry. The cold clicks of computer animation can never match the love and human interaction needed to bring inanimate objects to life. Wallace and Gromit remain a lasting testament to the magic of stop motion; you can understand why many children still prefer it to CGI.
We are living through a horribly barren age when it comes to children’s entertainment. Risk-averse studios have pretty much given up on producing original content, preferring instead to pilfer the classics and then rinse them of whatever it was that made them popular in the first place – see Disney’s woeful Snow White remake.
The original Bagpuss series was set in the Victorian era, giving it a nostalgia that felt in keeping with the oddity of its characters. According to Birmingham-based production company Threewise Entertainment, the new film will be set in ‘contemporary Britain’, a bleak prospect suggesting it will be tainted by the coarsened tyrannies of today. Bagpuss is described at the beginning of each episode as ‘the most important, the most beautiful, the most magical saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world’. In order to succeed the film will need to stay true to that legacy.
Comments