This piece was originally published on 13 July, 2014
My teenage daughter Martha does not like stuffed furry animals. It’s odd: she is perfect in every other respect, but on this she will always be a disappointment to me. I tell her she is losing out; she tells me to grow up. And there it rests.
Or rested, until the wonderful news that the knitted mouse-like characters the Clangers are making a comeback – both in a new exhibition celebrating children’s broadcasting, Here’s One We Made Earlier, which opens this week at The Lowry in Salford, and in a new CBeebies series of 52 episodes to run next year. Their planet, home to the Soup Dragon and the Music Trees, is making a joyous return. I am excited; but worried, too.
We are told the new version will be “modern”. Not too modern, I hope. Because job number one for the little furry creatures is to show children that fun did not begin with the invention of the iPhone. Long before that, in what my kids call “the black-and-white days”, we had fun, too.
The depth of youngsters’ suspicion about those times was brought home to me recently by my other daughter, Clara, who is 10. I was telling her that when I grew up in the late Sixties, we had no car, and she looked momentarily interested. “Oh,” she said, thoughtfully. “When were they invented?”
Ah, yes. Not much had been invented in 1968. We had not even been to the moon. But when my children sit down for their compulsory Clangers session next year, they will discover that, in spite of us having (in their imagination) no cars; in spite of us not having the technology to make animated objects move in anything other than jumpy, unrealistic form; in spite of all these difficulties, we had something more.
The Clangers were sweet and innocent and fluffy, but they packed a punch; they were subversive as well. The Soup Dragon was a woman. A woman dragon. In the Sixties.
Just as much as David Frost, the Clangers were groundbreaking; satire for the very young. They did not pander or preach. Sometimes the storylines were a bit thin (Tiny Clanger and Small Clanger have a disagreement over a length of rope, but then decide to get some soup from the Soup Dragon).
But there was more to Clangerland: they gently and insistently poked fun at the world; the best example being their attitude to space exploration, the dominating passion of the times – the Moon landings came midway through the Clangers’ TV run. So, just as our thoughts were full of “one small step”, the Clangers had an episode entitled The Intruder. A space capsule arrives from Earth on their planet and tries, as the script has it, “to dig up pieces and make off with them”. The narrator – the peerless Oliver Postgate – poses a question: “Who can say what havoc may be caused by these unwarranted intrusions?”
The Clangers decide at the end of the story that they, too, should travel in space, but one of them looks at Earth through a telescope and sees a black-and-white image of New York and decides not to go. Postgate intones: “Oh dear, yes, I see. What an unpleasant-looking place. I don’t think the Clangers want to go there. They put the rocket away and save it for something useful.”
The challenge for the Clangers is that the modern version must be as un-PC as the old one. If it is to keep its place as the finest knitted satire on TV, it must not lose its nerve – it must be willing to hit out at some modern targets. It must question things, and do so in a manner that surprises. Will Major Clanger come out against gay marriage? Will Tiny Clanger discover that recycling is a waste of time? Will they buy a tablet computer but discover that books are better? The Clangers have a responsibility to challenge orthodoxy: I hope they live up to it.
The word that sums up the Clangers’ humour is mordant. It has edge, it has bite. Never mind that the details might be lost on the tiny audience, but mum and dad will get it and smile, or grimace.
That is the mark of all decent children’s TV. The real classics must appeal to the whole family. They must “speak to the condition”, as Quakers say, of everyone in the room. That is what TV-watching should be all about.
And this is where lesser, more modern children’s TV falls down. Postman Pat has a cosy niceness that is part of the fun of childhood, and I don’t want to be seen as an enemy of cosy. But my adult psyche was severely damaged by a 13-hour drive from South Carolina to Washington DC (we lived in America when the kids were young) during which the only tape we had in the car was Postman Pat’s Foggy Day.
By the end, we were ready to stuff Jess where the sun don’t shine. It’s all too saccharine. I have to admit we enjoyed the fact that Martha (who had an American accent in her early life) talked about Postman Pat as if she had never left Pencaster (the fake Cumbrian village where Pat lives). But that was a passing pleasure: Pat is history for us now.
And so, of course, is all the cartoon nonsense that the children watched, eyes glazed, in their early American lives. Children’s TV needs to be warm, fun and unthreatening, and all the other things that the big bad world is not, but it can be all of these things and more. What the Americans never grasped, it seemed to me, is that kids, as they grow up, like devilment. We all do. A former boss of mine on the Today programme used to use that word about what we did, or attempted to do. Great broadcasting needs to have more than technical brilliance or intellectual heft: it needs that x-factor of naughtiness.
We used to bring the children back to Britain in the summer, and I remember our shock when they refused to come and eat their supper because they had discovered CBBC on an English hotel TV. It was funny. A little anarchic. Much less polished, but much more enjoyable. I am convinced that part of the reason our children were happy to come to live in Britain (they were all born abroad) was that they thought of it as being more fun.
So welcome back to our planet, Tiny Clanger, Small Clanger, Major Clanger and the Soup Dragon. You have the power to remind us what is important, what is valuable, what is fun. But remind us as well not to take ourselves too seriously. I hope the modern Clangers can still bite.
Justin Webb is a presenter on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme. An exhibition of children's TV favourites, ‘Here’s One We Made Earlier’, is at The Lowry in Salford from July 19; thelowry.com
