The other day we were listening to the Ivor The Engine soundtrack in the office. Jonny Trunk put it out a little while back and every time I hear it I'm reminded of being eight and eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches with an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be fine. My mum was kind of weird you see and as a kid I wasn't allowed any drinks that fizzed, food that contained sugar (it was carrot cake for birthday's one through five) and things that came out of the TV were basically equated with subliminal satanic eyeball feeds. Pop music? Forget about it. The one exception to the No Fun Regime were Oliver Postgate's television programs.Like Trunk, Postgate and his partners Peter Firman and Vernon Elliot (the guy responsible for all the incredible music in Postgate productions) represent the old, weird with a y, crinkly and unique bits of a Britain that is about to disappear quicker than jobs at Merril Lynch. Their company Smallfilms operated out of a cowshed in Canterbury and made the jittery, so-real-you-can-almost-touch-them, stop motion animation of some of the finest programs ever made for little people and big people who still want to be little people. [Ivor](http://www.youtube.com/watch? The Clangers, Bagpuss and Noggin The Nog were just about the right side of homespun and innocent to endear my mum so they made up 99% of what I built my childhood frame of reference around. As if to hammer home the fact that those days are gone for ever and ever Postgate just went and passed away. Now I'm really bummed. Hopefully he is hanging out with the great Soup Dragon in the sky.JAMES KNIGHT
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