Oliver Postgate – A verb not a noun
Yesterday’s Desert Island Discs featured Oliver Postgate, creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss. I listened in as my husband & I have an assortment of Postgate paraphernalia that we’ve carried with us from childhood, and some that we’ve picked up since. Postgate seems to make those programmes that become part of growing up.
He said he didn’t really think about how his creations would be received by children and instead focused on great stories to appeal to any age. He suggested that children would be patronised by programmes made just for kids.
The part of the interview that distracted me from lunch was when Kirsty Young mentioned that Postgate considered himself to be “a verb not a noun”. His sense of his own identity seemed intrinsically linked to continuously doing things, whatever those things were.