Peter Firmin, the creator of popular children’s television programmes including Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog, has died at home in Kent surrounded by his family.



The 89-year-old had been working until early this year on a £5m reboot of the Clangers, another animation for the BBC that he made with his creative partner of 50 years, Oliver Postgate.

Firmin, an artist who slid into television through his collaboration with Postgate, also created Basil Brush for the puppeteer Ivan Owen and co-created Ivor the Engine, the tale of a gentle steam train that first puffed on to the schedules of ITV in 1959.

For many, he will be best remembered for the yawning cloth cat Bagpuss and the chattering woodpecker Professor Yaffle (a send up of the philosopher Bertrand Russell) which was first broadcast by the BBC in 1974.

Firmin with two of his characters. Photograph: Toby Melville/PA

Earlier, he conjured up The Clangers – pink aliens popping out of lunar craters – from cardboard, wool, cotton-reels and anything else that was to hand at his farmhouse outside Canterbury where he lived since the late 1950s with his wife Joan, a collaborator, not least on the knitting patterns for the Clangers puppets.

It was at his Kent home that he died at the weekend after a short illness, with Joan and five of his six daughters at his side, said Daniel Postgate, the son of Oliver Postgate who died 10 years earlier.

Several of Firmin’s daughters became artists including Emily, who featured as herself aged eight at the beginning of every episode of Bagpuss. He had 11 grandchildren and several great grandchildren and loved tall ships sailing, joining voyages across the English Channel to Brittany in his mid-eighties.

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin filming The Clangers, 1968. Photograph: Smallfilms/Victoria and Albert Museum

“It’s an end of an era,” Postgate said. “It was a golden age of children’s TV. Oliver and Peter were mavericks. They were pioneers in doing what people hadn’t done before. They did it in a cheap, seat-of-their-pants way and were left to their own devices to make what they wanted. There weren’t focus groups and child psychologists looking over their work.”

Their creative and sometimes strange work did lead to the odd difficulty. When they broadcast an episode of Pogles Wood featuring a scary witch, the fear from some children watching it was so great that the BBC had to rein them in. But their work was widely loved and Firmin was granted a special award by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2014.

A spokesman for the production company Coolabi said: “During a career spanning over six decades, Peter worked with great skill in a remarkably wide variety of creative disciplines as a fine artist, craftsman and author. Of all his work, he will probably be most fondly remembered for the characters he co-created and made. Peter continued to work with great enthusiasm on creative projects right up until the beginning of 2018, most notably on a new series of Clangers, which won a Bafta in 2015.

Floella Benjamin, who fronted children’s shows such as Play School and Play Away and is now a baroness, recalled that all Firmin wanted to do “was to create magic to stimulate kids’ minds through his creative vision”.

Born in Harwich in 1928, Firmin trained at the Colchester School of Art and, after a period of national service in the Navy, he attended the Central School of Art and Design. It was while he was teaching there that he met Postgate and they founded the production company Smallfilms.

In recent years, he criticised the use of computer-generated imagery on modern-day programmes - saying there was more life in his knitted puppets. “I hate CGI faces on humans because you look in the eyes and there’s nothing there,” he said. “There’s no soul.”



Retaining the knitted characters in the new Clangers was important to him, he said, as he took on the role of design consultant and co-executive producer on the revival. “With HD and the very good production, you do feel you could almost hold them now,” he said.

Two years ago when there was an exhibition of Firmin and Postgate’s work at the V&A Museum of Childhood in east London, Firmin told the Guardian: “When two people work together, you complement each other. We felt our future was together. He did the writing and I did the making. I could draw the things that he imagined. It was the perfect partnership, really.”

Facts about Peter Firmin’s best-loved characters

Bagpuss was imagined as a marmalade cat but, when the puppet was sent to be dyed, it came back pink and Firmin decided to keep the colour, which became one of the most distinctive and original parts of the show.

The Clangers’ planet required some unusual housekeeping. Swallows nesting in the barn where the studio was located would regularly leave droppings on the planet at night requiring a morning clean up before filming could begin. Mice also nibbled away at the knitted Soup Dragon puppet when they left a chocolate prop in its claws after filming.

Ivor the Engine was partly inspired by Oliver Postgate’s love of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. They sought to echo the poem’s wistful melancholy in the show. The decision to have a train as a main character was also motivated by the difficulty of animating legs.

The look of the characters in Noggin the Nog was inspired by a visit Firmin and Postgate made to the British Museum, according to Daniel Postgate. There they saw the Lewis chessmen which were probably made in Norway, but were found in the Western Isles.

In 1964, Basil Brush shared a billing with an overly aggressive Scottish hedgehog named Spike McPike. Spike faded while Basil got his own half-hour show on the BBC which ran for 12 years and attracted audiences of 13 million.