We can all stickle it

Growing up in the 1970s, I was fed a diet of BBC children’s programmes like Bagpuss and The Clangers. If you’re unfamiliar with them, please allow me a short childhood reminiscence.

Bagpuss was first shown in 1974 — the story of a magical cloth cat that came alive. Every episode a young girl, Emily, would wake up Bagpuss and give the cat a mysterious object she had found. Bagpuss would then raise his friends from their slumbers to come and help: Professor Yaffle, Gabriel the Toad and the mice from the Mouse Organ. Together they would identify the item and set about repairing it.

Each episode was 10 minutes long and only 26 were ever made. That’s just four and a half hours of programming. The episodes were repeated until the late 1980s and therefore became the background to our lives, seeping into our collective conscious until the characters felt like close family members.

This is how every episode of Bagpuss began: “Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Emily. And she had a shop. It was rather an unusual shop, because it didn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost, and Emily had found and brought home to Bagpuss. Emily’s cat Bagpuss — the most important, most beautiful, the most magical saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world.”