Oliver Postgate

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and seven.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is one of Britain's best loved animators, Oliver Postgate. As the creator of Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, and the Clangers, his films and voice have a special place at the heart of countless childhoods. Indeed, his T V series Bagpoose was, only a few years ago, nominated the best BBC Children's Programme of all time, an achievement made all the more exceptional because only thirteen episodes were ever produced, and they were made in a cowshed at a total cost of £700. Yet the picture Bagpoose conjures of a cozy, sepia-tinted childhood is significantly at odds with its creator's experience. Brought up largely by a series of neglectful housemaids and plonked in a progressive boarding school he hated, he says I came to regard myself as a nuisance. As a result, I suffer from a basic assumption that I am wrong. So this insecurity, this feeling of not quite being worthy or belonging, that began very early.

Oliver Postgate1:26

Oh, yes, it was almost like a sort of witch's gift. I was led to believe right from the very root that somehow anything I thought of was inherently wrong, just because I thought of it. So I then had to think of something even funnier and even cleverer than I would naturally think of in order to be there at all. And it's quite absurd. I've only come to realise what it meant many, many years later.

Presenter1:54

That's an incredible phrase, this witch's gift. You describe it as what a sort of almost little curse that was thrown

Oliver Postgate2:00

Yes, it's a witch's gift. It's something that is inserted into your psyche at a very early age, but not intentionally.

Presenter2:00

Yes.

Presenter2:08

The knack that you perfected as an animator was creating these perfect microcosms, these these tiny worlds where the d details were the all important things. I w was was the detail significant to you? As a child watching it, that was what seemed important to me.

Oliver Postgate2:22

Yes, I would

Oliver Postgate2:24

Really, we didn't have time to think about that. We didn't realize Peter Furmyn, who was my colleague, we were feeding the television machine. We just worked, and we we thought up stories, and we didn't really think about them being anything except fun.

Presenter2:40

And they were produced out of this tumble-down shed in Kent, not from an animation studio. I mean, what was day-to-day working life like?

Oliver Postgate2:47

I had my animation table and all these pieces of cardboard which were the limbs of the people involved in it, and I was pushing them along with a pin and pressing the button on the camera.

Oliver Postgate2:58

in the hope of getting about a hundred and twenty seconds of film out in a day. I now more recently have discovered that the average animation studio gets two seconds a day out and considers it's done well.

Presenter3:12

We'll come to the detail of how you made these wonderful films a little later, but for now tell me about your first piece of music.

Oliver Postgate3:18

Oh well, if I go to this desert island of yours I shall need something to wake me up in the morning and tell me that life is still worth living. So the Bath Festival Orchestra playing part of Brandenburg Concerto No. two in F major.

Presenter4:33

The Bath Festival Orchestra, playing part of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. Two in F major, conducted by Yehudi Menuen. You grew up then on Verpose Gate in London in a prominent political family. What kind of childhood did you have?

Oliver Postgate4:45

They weren't prominent exactly, but they were very political, that's right. My grandfather was George Lansbury, who was leader of the Labour Party in 1935 and a pacifist and a great socialist, and my mother was his secretary. So she used to take us to the House of Commons occasionally, and we heard him speak, which was marvellous. I couldn't understand a word they were talking about, but it was a lovely sound. My father was editor of Tribune, which was a left-wing weekly paper at the time, and we were deep in the movement in a sense. But of course, all that meant was that my parents were rather absent most of the time.

Presenter5:22

Your parent

Oliver Postgate5:23

Parents were busy but

Presenter5:23

Uh

Oliver Postgate5:23

But they weren't busy with you. Ray, my father, was a rather distant figure, but he was very friendly. And Daisy, my mother, was a very important part of my life, but a lot of the time she wasn't there. And John and I were regarded as a general nuisance, I think, as indeed we were in a tiny little box of a house in Hendon. Did you like confidence as a little boy? I appeared to be an errant show-off all the time trying to draw attention to myself and everything else, but this was an upside-down effect. I just simply wanted somebody to admit that I existed. And so I really had either complete confidence based on the fact that of a complete absence of confidence. I do hope I'm making sense. That does make.

Presenter6:06

Complete

Oliver Postgate6:07

Makes sense, I think. I was relieved to hear it. It took me a long time to find out that it made sense.

Presenter6:07

And kiss.

Presenter6:13

In nineteen thirty nine then, war broke out, you were evacuated to Dartington Hall a progressive school where you were entirely left to your own devices.

Oliver Postgate6:17

A progressive school.

Oliver Postgate6:22

Uh pretty well. I couldn't find anything to join in with. I'd been in an ordinary school in which uh there was a hierarchy of some sort. I was a member of a house and somebody cared what you did. The essential thing about Dartington was that it was theory-led, and you were required, expected, to do what you fancied. So if some if I went to somebody and say, What shall I do now? they would say, Well, what do you want to do? and I would say, I don't want to do anything except what I ought to be doing. And they would say, No, no, you must do always do what you want to do. And I didn't want to do anything at that time. I wanted to join in.

Presenter6:22

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate7:00

It's a very good school for goats.

Oliver Postgate7:03

But it's no good for sheep, you see, and I'm a sheep.

Oliver Postgate7:06

It was

Oliver Postgate7:07

One of the unhappiest periods of my life.

Presenter7:09

What sort of legacy do you think that education had?

Oliver Postgate7:11

Oh, d uh very very powerful uh on me.

Oliver Postgate7:16

Having been

Oliver Postgate7:18

Deprived of self-discipline.

Oliver Postgate7:21

Completely.

Oliver Postgate7:22

I still, in my eighties, have a fight with myself to make myself do something I don't fancy at any given moment, which is ridiculous. It makes me really angry with myself.

Presenter7:34

But you see, here you are having this terrific uh life of

Presenter7:39

of involving children, engaging children because of the ability of your imagination and your technical skills. And you could say the reason that you've developed those very original skills is because you were given this mental flexibility, if you like, because of your education.

Oliver Postgate7:54

I don't think I was given it. I had it all along.

Presenter7:56

Well, it was fostered, I mean, by that age.

Oliver Postgate7:56

But it was f

Oliver Postgate7:58

Yeah, in a sense, to some degree it was. But that was original. That was there already. It could have been fostered by another school, and I might have become something useful instead of what I am. But I'm rather glad I didn't.

Oliver Postgate8:12

Yeah.

Presenter8:12

Tell me about your second piece of music. What have you chosen?

Oliver Postgate8:13

Oh, well, I I can remember from my first school we used to sing English traditional songs and I liked them very much. I loved them and I sang all the time.

Oliver Postgate8:23

This is one of them, but this version isn't quite the same as the one we used to sing.

Speaker 48:28

And they waive.

Speaker 48:30

Longing her kisses to share.

Speaker 48:36

Call is true.

Speaker 48:37

This he had a most

Speaker 48:44

Don't move.

Speaker 48:45

Day.

Speaker 48:49

Elicate air And they toasted that less with the delicate air.

Presenter8:58

Josh White and the lass with the delicate air. So then in nineteen forty three oh, you were eighteen then, and you were called upon to do your bit for king and country. What was your reaction?

Oliver Postgate9:10

Very difficult. I was very firmly convinced that Hitler was a phenomenon of the Versailles Treaty, that the way which Germany had been treated at the end of the First War was the cause of the discontent that gave rise to Hitler, and that if we had another one, then the wheel would turn again and there would be another fifty million people killed twenty-five years later. And it seemed to me at the time that to join in

Oliver Postgate9:39

was wrong. I mean, I think I was wrong.

Oliver Postgate9:43

In doing it, because in practice the wheel did not turn again. Your father, Raymond Poskid, he had also been a conscientious objector. That's right, that's right. And he put me in touch with the Quakers, and they told me how to go through the process of becoming a conscientious objector, which I found the army didn't really know about. So, what happened when you actually went along to not sign up? I got my call-up papers and I said, I'm not coming, but I will present myself for arrest at the Cumberland Barracks in Windsor at 11am on a Thursday. And I can remember arriving there, and they hadn't told the man in the guard house about it. And he said, Well, what you kind of sign up then? I said, No, I've

Oliver Postgate10:21

I've come not to sign up, actually. You said wouldn't you have done better doing that somewhere else?

Oliver Postgate10:30

I said, no. He said, well, all right then. So this rather nice, well brought up, Eaton, educated officer came in and said, Well, what's the drill, old man? Can you tell me? I mean, what do we do with you? I said, well, I think you have to you have to put me into custody then. He said, oh, I don't want to do that to a chap. I said, no, I don't think you've got any alternative, really. He said, well, we won't lock the door. Will that be all right?

Oliver Postgate10:54

I then had to sort of lead them through the process, and it was marvellously English, actually, and I was so relieved by the.

Oliver Postgate11:03

courtesy with which I was treated.

Presenter11:05

To be clear, you spent two months in prison.

Oliver Postgate11:07

Oh yes, yes, the the whole thing was totally absurd. I I

Presenter11:10

I enjoyed it tremendously. You talk about the courtesy with which the establishment treated you, both when you decided to be a conscientious objector and after you came out. And y you have said since that that opportunity has left you feeling like I think your phrase is a guest on the planet.

Oliver Postgate11:18

That's right.

Oliver Postgate11:25

My brother said in passing, there's no reason why we should feed you, is there? This was when they were bringing food in from abroad, and I said, There's none. And because I'd refused to fight. In general terms, I have this reservation that I was not entitled to be righteous. The world didn't belong to me. And yes, as you say, I am, in a sense, a guest.

Presenter11:34

Because you'd refuse to find it.

Presenter11:47

Your C V is intriguing. I mean, you spent, uh after the war was over about a decade doing some well, I was going to say odd jobs, and actually some of them were very odd jobs indeed. I mean, you you you managed a button plating factory.

Oliver Postgate11:55

I mean you you

Oliver Postgate11:59

That's right. I even made the equipment to do it. You m so you invented the device. Yes, yes. I invented things. I was actually possessed by this demon of invention.

Presenter11:59

That's right.

Presenter12:03

Yeah.

Presenter12:08

What about some of the more bizarre things that you invented?

Oliver Postgate12:11

The rule

Presenter12:11

Rule.

Oliver Postgate12:11

Yeah.

Presenter12:11

Yeah. Terry grass cutter

Oliver Postgate12:13

Uh

Presenter12:13

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate12:13

Oh, yes, these were fortuitous. I can remember my poor mother with the washing machine. There weren't any washing machines about, and I made her one out of a milk churn, but because I couldn't make the sort of gland to keep the w water in, I had to rotate the entire frame backs and forwards. It washed beautifully, but it had this strange habit of wandering, so that she would switch it on and nip out of the scullery, and she never knew where it was going to get to, and sometimes she would come back and hear it knocking against the door as it was trying to get out, and then one day it it managed to turn itself over and d it died in a heap of

Presenter12:13

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate12:49

Bubbles and all the lights in the house went off.

Presenter12:52

Like something that would be in a fantastical animation, actually. You could have employed that at a little bit of a reality.

Oliver Postgate12:55

They all worked, but they had their minor disadvantages. But they've all turned up in the world since, I'm happy to say. Tell me about your third record, The Delius. Well, I think stuck on a hot, sandy island, I shall miss certain peacefulnesses, sitting by a woodland pool on a summer evening and looking at the dust flittering on the surface and watching the dragonflies among the reeds. Something that we wouldn't get on a desert island.

Presenter14:27

SUMMER EVENING BY FREDRIC DELIAS, PERFORNED BY TROYA PHILHAMONIC ORCESTA and conducted by Sir Thomas Beacham. You clearly have a very creative brain. You have described yourself in the past as a a verb, not a noun. What do you mean? What do you mean by that?

Oliver Postgate14:41

What do you mean? I'm a thing for doing things. I was brought up to think of myself as inferior. I didn't exist unless I was doing something, unless I could show that I had achieved something. So I was forced into neurotic achievement almost. And Prue used to say to me, for goodness sake, get yourself a project, you're not fit to live with. I felt I was like a mincing machine or a sausage machine, and that if there was no sausage going through, it minced itself.

Presenter15:09

You mentioned Prue there. You had spent your life up until you met her, sort of drifting without a drink. Oh, yes, I was.

Oliver Postgate15:14

Oh yes, absolutely, because I was trying to find ways of earning my living, but the only end product was myself. Um I met Prue and she had already got three children.

Oliver Postgate15:29

And suddenly there was somebody who accepted me as I was and was happy with me.

Presenter15:36

was finding love.

Oliver Postgate15:37

If you find

Presenter15:37

purpose because the

Oliver Postgate15:38

Yes, yes, I had I wasn't uh just feeding m my own ego or anything like this. I had really got to earn enough money to keep four other people, you know. So I immediately went and worked for the television as a stage manager.

Presenter15:38

Yes, yes.

Presenter15:51

And what was your first venture into animation then? How did you come from being a stage manager?

Oliver Postgate15:54

Well, quite simply, I was attached to the children's department at ITV and I looked at what they were producing and thought, well, I could do better than that. So I went away and wrote a story called Alexander the Mouse, The Mouse Born to Be King. And at the same time the company had adopted a completely mad form of magnetic animation.

Oliver Postgate16:18

And so I found Peter Furmin, who was an artist. He was a bit dubious about making these cardboard mice to be moved about with magnets, especially because if you approach them from underneath the table, if you got the magnet the wrong way round, they would leap in the air and turn upside down, which occasionally happened on the programme. So I had to reach in a hand into the picture and turn it over. And thank goodness nothing was ever recorded because it went out on the air.

Presenter16:45

So Alexander the Mouse was your first collaboration with Peter Franklin. What do you think the key to your relationship with Peter was?

Oliver Postgate16:52

He had a large family to keep, and I had a large family to keep, and we had work to do, so we got on with it, and our life was spent in.

Oliver Postgate17:00

dispute. It was as if he was my brother, in a sense, because we argued fiercely all the time. People said those two can't ever work together again. But the moment the subject we were arguing about was finished with,

Oliver Postgate17:13

Nothing remained, we were still friends.

Presenter17:14

Was the decision to use your voice for all of these soundtracks and explaining the stories, was that again purely?

Oliver Postgate17:21

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate17:22

We couldn't afford anything else. At ten pounds a minute for the finished film we had to use what we could use. I had been an actor, you see, for a while, so I was used to.

Oliver Postgate17:32

Performing, as you might call it, but only later, when we started getting properly paid for the work, we were able to afford actors.

Oliver Postgate17:40

But even then I kept on doing the narration and everything else,'cause it seemed to work.

Presenter17:46

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Oliver Postgate17:47

Well, throughout my life I loved jazz, and I really, really liked slightly constructed jazz, but this particular piece I'm very devoted to.

Presenter18:55

Pete Fountain and When the Saints Come Marching In. So there you were, Oliver, toiling away in your cow shed in Kent. Um do you did you ever wish that you'd boned up on the art of animation first? No

Oliver Postgate19:08

No, absolutely not. The art which I had was how to make films for ten pounds a minute, for the television which was hungry for whatever it could get, and some of the early films have the worst animation you've ever seen in your life. But it doesn't matter because the stories are

Presenter19:24

Oh, nice. And what about the conditions that you were making these films at? I mean, you weren't in some rarefied, air-conditioned studio.

Oliver Postgate19:30

Yeah.

Speaker 419:31

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate19:32

I was in a total mess. I've always worked in a total mess anyway. I built the animation table myself. It wasn't air-conditioned, it was anything but air-conditioned. It was a slightly enlarged pigsty. And in winter time, I had this coke stove which belched forth fumes, and in the summer it became intolerably hot. And I was moving either the engine frame by frame along with a sharpened screwdriver and clicking the button and so on. And then the sweat would be running down my hands, and I had to wear little bands round my wrists to stop it running down onto the artwork.

Oliver Postgate20:05

I had a very brightly lit table and the flies would just land in the middle of the picture, you know, and I'd be going on quite happily feeling noticing a little blue bottle wandering about. And so for a tenth of a second

Oliver Postgate20:15

There's a blue bottle wandering across the picture, and I'd have to reshoot the whole shot, or else leave it in,'cause nobody noticed.

Presenter20:22

I'm very interested in how you engage children. I mean, do you basically think children are little eccentrics?

Oliver Postgate20:28

I had no I had no idea about the children, never gave them a thought.

Oliver Postgate20:34

Having an infantile mind, I liked the ideas. I mean, Ivor the engine, the Welsh engine that wants to sing in the choir. I mean, it had overtones of Dylan Thomas, it had overtones of all sorts for grown-ups, and also it was an amusing story for the children at the same time. But the point about it was, if you did things solely intended for the kiddiwinks, you were insulting them, because children, I believe, learn by picking up fag ends. You know, they want to be round the edges of adult life and pick things up. Tell me about your fifth piece of music. Oh, well, I suppose I'll have to take something with me to remind me of all those years I spent pushing bits of card along with a pin. But all the pieces of music were composed for me by Vernon Elliott. And like all of them, this one goes with a picture which I'll tell you about. It comes from the saga of Noggin and the Ice Dragon, and the Nogs are settling down to sleep in a high valley. But Graculus, the great green bird, is disturbed. He looks out and knows that behind the mountains there is a lake with green trees around it, and there are fish blue fish.

Oliver Postgate21:46

He also knows that he has never been there since he was hatched.

Oliver Postgate21:50

But Noggin says, Go and see.

Oliver Postgate21:53

For perhaps your egg remembers what it never saw, and there you will find your home.

Presenter22:29

Greculus's memory music from Nog in the Nog, performed by the Vernon Elliott Ensemble. In nineteen seventy four, then, Oliver, you made thirteen episodes of a new series about a saggy old cloth cat.

Oliver Postgate22:42

So we did, Coldbag posted you.

Presenter22:43

Cold Bagpoos. Did you did you know you were making a hit?

Oliver Postgate22:46

No, no, no, no, no, no idea. Neither of us had. Peter

Oliver Postgate22:50

Peter had intended Bagpuss to be an Indian Army cat somewhere above Poona in a children's hospital where he would tell stories to children. And I said, I'm not having a studio full of children. I can handle puppets, but not children. So he decided to live in the window of Emily's shop and we found that the key to it was the fact that each time Emily brought something home

Speaker 123:02

Yeah.

Speaker 423:02

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate23:14

It gave us the inspiration for its story. So I can remember taking a pink elephant without any ears to Peter and dumping it down in front of him and saying, Well, what is the story of this? And that would provide the sort of seed for the originality, you see. Other stories I've had to pull out of the sky completely f from nothing, you know. But now there was a pink elephant to start it with, you see.

Presenter23:38

How were things in your real life around about that time? Because this was the sort of early to mid seventies. Were they safe in reasonable times?

Oliver Postgate23:41

Mid seventies were they safe and rest?

Oliver Postgate23:45

Anything about my parents both died within within weeks of each other and suddenly I was out on my own. I hadn't realized the extent to which when I went into my imaginary world I left my father in charge of the real world. Suddenly I w he was no longer there as a referee and I realized I was having to think about the world, the real world, and I didn't like it.

Oliver Postgate24:09

I didn't like it at all, and I was tremendously frightened of the winter of discontent when the miners are fighting political doctrinaire battles with Edward Heath government and so on. And I had been in Germany during the Große Knappe during the 1947 cold winter and I'd known that a civilization could collapse and I got really frightened. And I forced myself onto Women's Hour at the BBC. I walked in one day and said, I want to do an election broadcast on behalf of the poor bloody electors. So they said, yes, all right, do it. If the gods let us play it, they will. And they did.

Presenter24:49

This anxiety that you had that the world, the real world, the world that you couldn't control was going to collapse, is is that are you generally somebody who carries anxiety with them through

Oliver Postgate24:59

Well, it's not my own anxiety. The world is so damn stupid that it is going to collapse if I'm not careful, and I'd keep trying to do things about it, but it doesn't happen, it doesn't work.

Presenter24:59

They

Presenter25:07

This is a world, though, so so at odds with the professional world that you inhabit, this as you've described it, this very safe, comfortable, contained, predictable world. Are you ever envious of that world, the world that you're able to create in its all its minutiae in front of the camera?

Oliver Postgate25:23

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate25:23

Oh, I I w I would move back into one of my created worlds very happily. But you're offering to do that for me today. I'm I'm looking forward to it.

Presenter25:27

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate25:31

Let's go to the sixth piece of music. What's that?

Oliver Postgate25:34

Well, funny enough, it goes back in my mind to when I was in Germany after the war in that very, very, very cold winter. And I think what I shall miss on this desert island where it's really hot, I shall miss the cold. I shall miss the exhilaration of riding out in Odroski with a gang of comrades to see the sun on the snow, and the green buds sprouting on the silver birches, and being able to breathe in great lungfuls of the icy air and know that the winter is over at last. That's what this particular record does for me, though I don't know a word of Russian.

Presenter26:36

The Pyatnyatsky State Russian folk choir singing Step O, Step Around, conducted by Valentin Levashov. So you and your wife Prue had three children together, along with the three children that she brought marriage. I mean, given your own insecure childhood, how adequate did you feel at making all these children feel secure and giving them a good childhood?

Oliver Postgate26:49

That's right.

Oliver Postgate26:53

Mm-hmm.

Oliver Postgate26:59

Prue had never entertained that aspect of my life which was that I wasn't sure that I was going to succeed. She knew perfectly well I was going to succeed and hadn't time to be bothered with any other ideas. And I went along with this and it was true for a while.

Presenter27:12

Do you think that Prue knew that that was the attitude she had to have in order to to make you cope?

Oliver Postgate27:18

I think it's very probable that she did. She was a very subtle lady and the effect of falling in love with her was to make me feel able to do absolutely anything, you know. It was a marvellous feeling.

Presenter27:29

In 1978, she was diagnosed with cancer, and you were told at that time that she wouldn't have long to live, but in fact, she did live years after.

Oliver Postgate27:32

You would

Oliver Postgate27:36

Well, we did. We did. We managed to wrestle another four years from the from the gods. No, she I remember she came to me, said, Look, I'm terribly sorry, I've got cancer and um

Oliver Postgate27:49

I remember thinking it was not something to be sorry about. Well, to be sorry, yes, but I mean, not to apologise for, you know. And, um, it it was, um

Oliver Postgate28:02

A difficult time because she was suffering very badly from manic depression at the same time, so she was either on top of the world or completely down, and I discovered that I couldn't put myself aside from it. I didn't want to. I w went down with her, and when she was really manic, I just had to hide sometimes, because it didn't make sense, but other times I was there to help. It was a happy time on a certain level.

Presenter28:30

When she was dying in nineteen eighty two she she gave you, I mean, what a lot of people might consider to be an unusual message, which was, after she was gone, not to mourn her, not to live your life mourning her.

Oliver Postgate28:30

She was dying in nineteen eighty.

Oliver Postgate28:39

Yeah.

Oliver Postgate28:41

Okay.

Oliver Postgate28:42

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'd had our last year and we mourned together, you know, as best we could. And she said, Don't be a celibate, you know, don't keep faith with me. She said, Get out and get on with it. And I did. But I made a complete fool of myself because I didn't know any of the rules of romantic behaviour and all sorts of mistakes were made, some of which woke me up in the middle of the night curling with embarrassment. But eventually I met Naomi, who was a historian who worked for the Cathedral in Canterbury.

Oliver Postgate29:18

We we we became close friends and eventually lovers and are now together very happily twenty years now.

Presenter29:24

In saying that to you, Prue said what many people are unable to say. That shows a remarkable generosity of spirit.

Oliver Postgate29:32

I think it was. Yes, yes, it was. It was also because we had so long to face the facts, you see. My mother, you see, some years before had committed suicide because she was fed up with life after my father died, and we were deeply, profoundly grieved by this, because she didn't tell us. She sent us away for the weekend to our cottage in Wales, and she was still alive when I got back. But I said to the doctor at the hospital, Don't bring her round. She will be furious if you do. She l didn't want to go on, so being an ancient Greek, not anything else, she took her pills and vanished. And that was her right. And nobody, nobody said she was making any mistake there, but it was just the suddenness of it.

Presenter30:18

Mm-hmm.

Presenter30:21

So you entirely respected her decision to do that.

Oliver Postgate30:22

Eliterally, not

Presenter30:23

Type. Eventually. Yeah.

Oliver Postgate30:25

I would do this.

Presenter30:25

Same myself. Let's take a break for your next piece of music.

Oliver Postgate30:29

Well, this was a piece I found for Prue actually, funnily enough. I came across it um shortly before she died, which was twenty five years ago now, and brought it to her and she loved it very dearly.

Oliver Postgate30:44

So this is for her.

Presenter31:32

Tais van Leer playing Introspection Two by Rochier von Otterloe.

Presenter31:37

So you're not enjoying a quiet retirement, exactly?

Oliver Postgate31:42

The moment everything goes quiet, I begin to sink like a stone. Naomi says the same as Prue, you only get yourself a project. You have grandchildren, of course, from your marriage.

Presenter31:50

Are you a doting grandfather?

Oliver Postgate31:51

But you lose

Oliver Postgate31:52

No, indeed, absolutely not. I am the remains of a working machine and I still work. And what I hate about old age is this tremendous lack of time and skill. I'm I take twice as long to do everything I used to do and I do it wrong now and I have to do it again. And I get furiously angry with myself because I've lost so many of my faculties. But nevertheless I keep on doing it and in the end it gets done.

Oliver Postgate32:16

People have said to me, Why don't you lie back on your laurels? I say, What would I bloody do if I lay back on my laurels? They're prickly And my children thank goodness have got used to it now and they they come to me when they want to talk about something important, but the the idea of being a doting uh article of furniture around the edges is uh they they've given that ambition up now.

Presenter32:37

You don't seem to have much of an idea how much you are adored in terms of what you have created for people.

Oliver Postgate32:43

Yes, because I was the machine, I was the mechanism, I was the means by which you said I'm a verb, not a noun, I am a means for doing it. People say to me, I enjoy that bagpus film tremendously, the one about the Hemish. I said, Yes, did you see the mouse mill? That was good as well. He's a big-headed bastard, they think. But it's not it's nothing to do with me. It's a thing, it exists in its own right.

Presenter33:04

But I don't think people do think at all that you're big-headed. People think how remarkable he thought of that, he narrated it, he made it beautiful, he enlivened my childhood. I don't think people think that it's not.

Oliver Postgate33:12

But he doesn't hesitate to admire it himself, and that's uh that's you. Oh, and no, that's being logical, but it's not the English thing you do. You are modest about it, you know, and say say, Oh, well, I was lucky or something, you know. But I'm actually I look back on the things I've done and I enjoy them.

Presenter33:15

Well, why shouldn't she?

Oliver Postgate33:28

It doesn't nourish me. I I want to go and do something else.

Presenter33:31

Do you appreciate that what you've done, what you've created, is a very singular, particular voice that has spoken to so many children so significantly?

Oliver Postgate33:41

I I I'm I'm told that this is so, yes, but it doesn't work. It hasn't got rid of the witch's gift I received when I was very, very young, which was that everything you do is essentially chancy and wrong. You you should have settled down and learned the trade

Presenter33:59

It seems terrible that those seeds of self doubt that were so deftly sown by your childhood have not been unearthed and thrown away by the achievements.

Oliver Postgate34:09

No they are the driving force of the achievement.

Oliver Postgate34:13

I wouldn't have done any of these things if I hadn't needed to keep doing things to prove that I existed.

Presenter34:13

I hope to

Oliver Postgate34:20

I regard it as an illness. I regard it as a personality fault that I'm able to do these things. I'm delighted.

Presenter34:26

How good light?

Oliver Postgate34:27

To be able to do the things and the things that please me now tremendously when I see them. Tell me about your eighth and final piece of music. Well, when you go to a desert island and you're alone, all your ghosts and all the blames and all the follies, the mistakes and the regrets, the toe-coiling stupidities we've been talking about, they come crowding in with you from the past. So I shall have to find a way to turn on them and turn on the whole daft world and tell it to get stuffed, and there's only one record for that.

Speaker 434:56

To that.

Speaker 135:02

Oh Riadoria.

Speaker 135:07

No runaway.

Speaker 135:12

Nigla beauté

Speaker 135:17

Nilamar, Usa de Bianega.

Speaker 135:23

Oh Riyadh, Riyadh.

Presenter35:27

Edith Piaff and Non General Grette Rienne. So of course we give you, Oliver, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you are allowed to take another book. What would yours be?

Oliver Postgate35:37

I would like a huge book of all English poetry,'cause I never gave it enough time in my life, and I regretted that I could spend a lot of time looking through and enjoying the things I've missed.

Presenter35:49

And you're luxury, of course, you're allowed something to make this desert island of yours a little more bearable. I would like a comfortable bed. We'll allow you that. Very devoted to that, yes. Now, when it comes to the music, if if the records were to be washed away and you had to run to save one of them, which would it be?

Oliver Postgate36:06

I think I would need to settle for

Oliver Postgate36:10

When the saints come marching in, because you never know, they might. Oliver Persgate thank

Presenter36:16

Thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you for letting me talk about them.

Presenter36:29

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.