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Seeing Things: An Autobiography
Seeing Things A charming memoir from the cult creator of Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the Engine, who died in December 2008. Full description
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This is a fascinating book and once I started reading it I didn't want to put it down. Because Ivor the Engine, the Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss are great favourites of mine I especially liked those sections about how Oliver Postgate and his co-creator Peter Firman created the characters and made the films. But I also thought the sections where he reveals his thoughts and emotions are particularly moving.
An exceptional life; a truly creative and inventive man.
An exceptional life; a truly creative and inventive man.
This was, quite simply, lovely. A story of the ways we muddle through life and how that can be extraordinary from someone who's a little awkward, not brilliant in school or excited about business or career, just very clever at building things and wonderfully creative. Of course, hearing about the making of Bagpuss and Clangers and all the rest is marvelous, just as the casual references to Bertrand Russell and G.D.H. Cole and his grandfather George Lansbury. This is also about love and loss and
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Oliver Postgate is one of the recognised fathers of British Whimsy, as entrenched as A. A. Milne or P.G. Wodehouse. His television creations delighted children, who grew up to be adults who
remained
delighted by them, because they were endearing and memorable.
Unsurprisingly, his memoir is equally as endearing, often a bit sad, but a reflection of a life in which confusion and anxiety were the flip side of the marvellous imagination and ability to lose himself in the creation of anything that im ...more
Unsurprisingly, his memoir is equally as endearing, often a bit sad, but a reflection of a life in which confusion and anxiety were the flip side of the marvellous imagination and ability to lose himself in the creation of anything that im ...more
First of all I must confess that I had never heard of Oliver Postgate before and I blame it on the fact that I'm not living in the UK, thus not knowing about his works. Secondly, I rarely read biographies. Though there was the wish to read this one for one simple reason - to catch a glimpse into the mind of such a creative person.
As much as I don't know the series and characters from TV I was hooked from page one and couldn't put the book down. Postgate's writing is full of humour, warmth and qu ...more
As much as I don't know the series and characters from TV I was hooked from page one and couldn't put the book down. Postgate's writing is full of humour, warmth and qu ...more
This is a brilliant read about an interesting man who has had an amazing life and approached it in a really positive way. Great if you liked his TV stuff or had very little interest in it. As he was an innovator and an inventor who liked to try things out by doing them himself. Everything is told in a warm, humourous and self-deprecating style that recalls the tone of the stories he told on television. But it also covers his personal life in the same tone.
Oliver Postgate was a small man in a big world. He made small films – his business was in fact called Smallfilms – and never aspired to make big ones. He lived a quiet life mostly in small towns in middle England pottering away at whatever happened to come his way; his life had no grand plan. Not that many people will instantly recognise his name, not in the same way that the name Gerry Anderson is known, but his work
is
known and loved and has been cherished by generations of British children m
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Postgate was the wonderful man who made my childhood a place of magic and safety with Bagpuss and this autobiography is just wonderful. Postgate was an extraordinary man, born to socialist parents whom he called by their first names and who worked from first principles without any engineering expertise to solve any mechanical problem, ending up in animation via a wide range of jobs from stage, farm and charity work in post war Germany. He speaks of his worlds as something that came through him r
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One of the best memoirs I've read. Touches on art, politics, 20th century history. Unexpectedly fascinating.
A warts-and-all expose full of salacious detail and debauchery. No, not really, just a thoroughly pleasant and warm-hearted memoir by my generation's favourite uncle. As gently witty and eccentric as you might expect, though the knowledge that he only lived for a few more years after its publication caused a lump in my throat as I approached the end.
Very readable - part nostalgia, part refreshingly cranky take on life, not sure how much empathy he had which made him less sympathetic than I expected.
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Oliver Postgate was an English animator, puppeteer and writer. He was the creator and writer of some of Britain's most popular children's television programmes. Pingwings, Pogles' Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with Peter Firmin, and were shown on the BBC between the 1950s and the 1980s, and on ITV from 1959 to the pr
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