Description

Bagpuss is a British animated children’s television series which was made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate through their company Smallfilms. The series of thirteen episodes was first broadcast from 12 February to 7 May 1974. The title character was “a saggy, old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”. Although only thirteen episodes were produced and broadcast, the programme remains fondly remembered, and was frequently repeated in the UK until 1986. In early 1999, Bagpuss topped a BBC poll for the UK’s favourite children’s television programme.

Bagpuss himself is a stuffed cloth cat, referred to in the intro as “The Most Important, The Most Beautiful, The Most Magical, Saggy Old Cloth Cat in the Whole, Wide World”.

The six mice carved on the side of the “mouse organ” (a small mechanical pipe organ that played rolls of music) wake up and scurry around, singing in high-pitched voices. The names of the six mice are: Charlie Mouse, Jenny Mouse, Janey Mouse, Lizzy Mouse, Eddie Mouse and Willy Mouse, although only three of the mice are ever referred to by their name; the remaining three are named only in the books which accompany the series.

A rag doll made of scraps, called Madeleine, sits in a wicker chair. Gabriel the toad, unlike most Smallfilms characters, could move by a special device beneath his can without the use of stop-motion animation.

The wooden woodpecker bookend became the drily academic Professor Yaffle (based on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom Postgate had once met).