Peter Firmin Rich Matthews interviews 2014 BAFTA Special Award recipient; Peter Firmin.
Idris. Professor Yaffle. Thor Nogson. The Soup Dragon. If those names evoke a warm sense of nostalgia then you are most definitely a fan of tonight’s Special Award recipient, Peter Firmin. His 30-year creative partnership with Oliver Postgate produced some of the UK’s most original, beloved and timeless children’s television ever produced, as Rich Matthews discovers…
“We were never trendy,” asserts this year’s Special Award winner, Peter Firmin. “We did what we thought was right. If you’re never trendy, you never go out of fashion.”
He’s right – Peter Firmin’s work was never trendy. It was exceptional. His children’s television programmes for Smallfilms with Oliver Postgate – active from 1959 into the mid-1980s – are also timeless: The Clangers, Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog and, of course, Ivor the Engine. Any child of that era remembers at least one, and most likely all, of those names.
“We were earning a living,” says Firmin of Smallfilms’ prolific output. “Oliver and I were working on our own with a few helpers and we just had to keep going. There wasn’t an enormous fortune to be made because the budgets were pretty small in those days. We just had to keep coming up with ideas. We never thought that we were producing things for generations to come.”
But that is exactly what they did – almost from the moment that Postgate recruited hard-up art teacher Firmin to “illustrate a television story”, the pair began to make television history.
“Oliver came up with the first stories – Alexander the Mouse and Ivor, things like that – and, later on, Noggin was my idea, and Bagpuss. Just the characters, mind you; he wrote the stories. Because we worked together so well, they just seemed to work. And we weren’t working for a committee. Nowadays, they have to have things very carefully vetted with lots of input from other people; whereas we were allowed to do what we thought was best. Considering how primitive our methods were and how homemade everything was, it’s amazing that they’ve lasted so long and people still remember them.”
Peter FirminLeft: Peter Firmin, Right: Oliver Postgate
