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He was the voice not just of my television childhood, but of everyone other person who grew up in 1960s and 70s Britain.

Oliver Postgate, whose death was announced yesterday, was the creator of such magical television gems as Ivor the Engine, Pogles Wood, Noggin The Nog, The Clangers and that wonderful saggy old Orthodox Miaoist Bagpuss, who was recently voted the nation's favourite tv animal of all time.

Together with his partner Peter Firmin, Postgate produced some of the most memorable-and charming children's programmes of all time. A far cry from the brash, in-yer-face and dreadfully charmless children's programmes of today.

Postgate was a remarkable man, and a member of a remarkable family. His grandfather was the saintly George Lansbury, the most left-wing leader the Labour Party has ever had. Postgate's father, Raymond, was a socialist journalist and a founder member of the British Communist Party. His aunt and uncle were Margaret and GDH Cole, both socialist writers (Raymond Postgate and GDH Cole co-authored 'The Common People'- one of the first accounts of working class history). His cousin was the famous actress Angela Lansbury.

In addition to his television work, Postgate was also an inventor (inventing a machine for electroplating plastic buttons and an electric rotary lawnmower), and a writer- he blogged in recent years for the New Statesman.

A lifelong pacifist, he was appalled by the imperialist arrogance which lay behind the neoconservative doctrine of 'regime change'.

Here's a great post of his from a couple of years back:

The other day I heard John Bolton - who lately resigned his post as US representative designate to the United Nations - saying how unforgivably evil it was of the Syrians to (allegedly) assassinate certain Lebanese politicians who were thought to be obstructing Syria’s ambition to gain political control of Lebanon. If true, that is certainly a despicable thing to do, definitely not the sort of behaviour we expect from a member of the community of nations.

Then, later, I heard that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had affirmed that the US expenditure of materials and human lives on a war intended to obtain political control of Iraq and bring to it US-style democracy is - and has been - as she put it, "a worthwhile investment".

Comparing these two projects, one can see that, although basically similar in purpose, the (alleged) Syrian investment is, in purely arithmetical terms, far more economical in outlay than the US one, in that only one or two lives were lost and little physical damage occurred, rather than the half-million or so lives that are thought to have been lost in the massive destruction unleashed by the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies.

Postgate was, according to his Daily Telegraph obituary, "a warm and unambitious man". What a wonderful epitath in an age in which the ruthless individualistic economic system we live under encourages us to be anything but "warm and unambitious".

Above you can watch a clip of the master at work in a wonderful BBC4 documentary about Postgate and Firmin.

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....is being broadcast on BBC2 at 0.20 am tonight (ie Tuesday morning).

If you're in Britain or able to receive BBC2 don't miss it, you won't regret it, I can assure you.

The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep (not 'Caesar's Sheep' as it states on the BBC website!), is an ingenious locked room mystery involving the murder, in a New York hotel room, of a key informant in a mobster trial. Police guard the ante-room and the windows are locked. How was the informant murdered?

The solution will be a surprise to most viewers, but all the clues are there before your very eyes.

The best ever episode in the best ever mystery series. Enjoy!

PS Note to BBC2 chiefs:

Well done for re-showing Ellery Queen- for that alone I'm happy to pay my licence fee. But why on earth show these wonderful programmes at twenty past midnight on a Monday night?

Put them on in the evenings on BBC1 or BBC2 and you'd be amazed at the ratings you'd get.

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A very happy 80th birthday to Batman- or rather to actor Adam West, who played the Caped Crusader in the wonderful 1960s television series. There’s been plenty of dark, ultra pretentious and very violent remakes since then- but none are in the same league as the 1960s version. Quite simply, Batman, with its great comic villains, its deadpan humour and its inspired and intelligent direction was one of the funniest, most stylish and most enjoyable television series ever made. (And the theme tune wasn’t bad either).

Hand me the shark-repellent bat spray, Robin!

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Neo-con aggression thwarted in the Caucasus. Sheffield Wednesday top of the Championship. Another Major for Padraig Harrington. And Denis Matyajaszek receiving the custard pie treatment from Daily Telegraph readers. Didn't think things could get any better?

Well, they're going to.

At 12.20 tonight (or rather in the early hours of Tuesday morning), BBC2 will show a classic episode of Ellery Queen: The 12th Floor Express. You can watch the first nine minutes of this wonderful mystery, set in the offices of a New York newspaper, here. For the rest of it, you'll just have to wait until the witching hour!
Mystery fans are in for a real treat, and our dear friend 'slapheads anonymous' will have a great chance to compare the acting abilities of the late, great Jim Hutton (pictured above) with the much over-hyped Heath Ledger. Enjoy!

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I hope British readers are enjoying the BBC’s excellent Dad’s Army weekend- to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s wonderful sit-com.

You can watch an extract from the excellent ‘Don’t Panic!’ tribute programme the BBC showed last night, above, and you can read my own appreciation pieces on why Dad’s Army is still so popular here and here.

Just a couple of further points while we're on the subject of Dad's Army:

1. How many of today’s nasty, sneering sitcoms and so-called 'comedy' shows will be celebrated forty years from now? I’m sure it will be a big fat zero.

2. Why on earth haven’t Jimmy Perry and David Croft been knighted? We give knighthoods away so cheaply nowadays, including to pretentious writers of turgid, unreadable books read by probably no more than half a dozen people (yes Mr Rushdie, I’m talking about you); yet we don’t properly honour the two men who have, over the past forty years, bought so much happiness and laughter to millions of people. Don’t forget Perry and Croft didn’t just give create and write Dad’s Army, but It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Hi De Hi too. I'm not a fan of the honours system, but if we are to hand out knighthoods- let's make sure they go to people who really deserve them.

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A very Happy 4th July to all American and US-based readers of this blog. And,(despite his views on Nicolas Sarkozy's trade policies), a special 'best wishes' to our regular US-based commenter Roland Hulme, who is to become a father. Many congratulations, Roland.

America's special day gives us a great excuse to celebrate that country's greatest detective: the one and only Ellery Queen. As regular readers will know, I'm a big Ellery Queen fan: the books are among the best mysteries ever written and as for the 1975 tv series.....well, words fail me.

You can hear the great theme music of EQ above (composed by Elmer Bernstein) and if you click here, you can watch a whole nine minutes of a classic EQ episode on You Tube. It was great that the BBC finally brought Ellery Queen back in 2006, but disappointing that the programmes were scheduled on BBC2 on Sunday mornings in the summer, when relatively few people would be watching. So if any BBC programme supremo does happen to wander pass this blog- please, please consider putting on the show on at peak time during the long winter evenings. You'll have a huge hit on your hands if you do.

UPDATE: Roland Hulme has become a father- his son being born on the 4th July!
Many congratulations to you and yours Roland, and I hope your son will eventually carry on the family blogging tradition. Being named after one of Britain'sbest bloggers might help!

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This article of mine appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.



We've already read a lot on Comment is free about 1968 - the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Paris riots and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. But there's one interesting aspect of that most tumultuous of years - and of the late 1960s in general - that has so far escaped attention. Namely, just how open we were in Britain to European culture. It might seem paradoxical, but the more Britain has integrated into the European Union, the less European cultural influences there are in this country.

In the late 60s, the pop charts were full of great European music. In the spring/summer of 1968, a regular play on Radio Caroline was the hauntingly beautiful French orchestral hit Ame Câline (Soul Coaxing) by Raymond Lefèvre (itself a cover of a song by French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff). Another big hit in 1968 was L'Amour Est Bleu (Love is Blue) performed by Paul Mauriat and his orchestra, also from France. The charts of the time were full of international acts, including Esther and Abi Ofarim from Israel (who in February 1968 became the first, and to date only, Israeli act to make it to No 1 in Britain), Nana Mouskouri from Greece, Aphrodite's Child (with Demis Roussos), Bert Kaempfert, Sacha Distel, Serge Gainsbourg and many others. The music of Jacques Brel and Gilbert Becaud was hugely popular, being covered by a whole host of British performers.

On television, BBC2 regularly showed foreign films on Saturday evenings. Today, if you ask Britons to name a continental film star, they'll probably only come up with just two: Juliette Binoche and Gérad Depardieu. Back in the 60s, Simone Signoret, Melina Mercouri, Yves Montand, Alain Delon, Fernandel, Catherine Deneuve, Romy Schneider, Gert Fröbe and Maximilian Schell were household names.

A feature of the mid/late 1960s was the international film - a production (sometimes co-produced) that featured actors from several countries. In Ship of Fools, France's Simone Signoret played alongside Austria's Oskar Werner, America's Lee Marvin and Britain's Vivien Leigh. In Topkapi, Greece's Melina Mercouri starred with Austria's Maximilian Schell, Armenian Akim Tamiroff and Peter Ustinov, a man whose own cosmopolitanism seemed ideally suited to the age. There were international comedies too: such as Monte Carlo or Bust: in which our very own Peter Cook and Dudley Moore starred alongside legendary French comedian Bourvil, Italy's Lando Buzzanca and Walter Chiari, and Germany's Gert Fröbe.

Then there's television. Children's TV schedules in the late 1960s abounded with excellent European imports from both western Europe: The Magic Roundabout, Hector's House, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (with its wonderful theme tune), Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, Belle and Sebastian, The Flashing Blade, and, from communist eastern Europe, The Mole, The Singing Ringing Tree and numerous animated features, as well as programmes that were co-productions between east and west, such as The White Horses, made by Radio Television Serbia and BR-TV of then west Germany.
Today, you will struggle to find a single programme on terrestial British television that has been made in continental Europe. There's certainly no children's television series that tells the story of a siege during the War of the Mantuan Succession, as The Flashing Blade did, or relates the story of a riding stables in the Balkans (The White Horses).

The sad truth is that the era of turbo-globalisation hasn't led to a greater cross-fertilisation of cultures as its supporters claimed it would - but the overwhelming dominance of an introspective, bland and dumbed-down transatlantic global culture that isn't a patch on the true cosmopolitanism we had in the 1960s.

The political changes in eastern Europe in the late 1980s has led to the slow death of the region's television and film industries: as subsidies were withdrawn, many film studios closed or have been taken over by western production companies. While in the west, media liberalisation has led to the decline of state television, a proliferation of privately owned satellite channels and a massive lowering in quality. The domination of the music industry by a handful of powerful multinational firms has led to a destruction of diversity: there's little chance of a French orchestral number getting into the higher echelons of the UK singles chart now.

Back in 1968, we faced currency restrictions whenever we travelled abroad and there were no cheap Ryanair flights or Eurostar trains to the continent. But while we may have found it harder to go to Europe, European culture certainly found it a lot easier to come to us.

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