This is an excerpt from The Clangers, which I didn't see until I was in my twenties, though I was familiar with Ivor the Engine. Oliver Postgate was special - a raging lefty but also a kind, bucolic kind of man who did children the service of taking them seriously - and thus producing intelligent work which is watchable over and again.
So the conundrum is: what children's popular culture will survive, despite the speed of technological and social change? CS Lewis seems to have survived so far, but I'm not convinced he'll hang on much longer. I haven't seen kids' TV for a long time, so can't really comment, though I do have a soft spot for My Parents Are Aliens.
What do you think? No nostalgia! Make a case.
5 comments:
Probably Barry Trotter, or whatever the hell those books are called.
(I own all 7, and love them)
PaRappa the Rapper. Every platform Sony have released since, a PaRappa The Rapper game has been one of the first releases. (Apart from the latest one but we're going to ignore that). Not only was he a hard working, hroundbreaking rapping dog but he was also bloody well determined, traits we should pass on to the youth of today.
I gotta believe he will be a cultural icon for years to come.
I wish you'd stop going on about that bloody PaRappa every 5 bloody minutes.
The one prerequisite for an enduring children's programme is that it should translate wholesale to a teens-to-twenties drug culture. At this age the kids encounter that heady brew of first-time nostalgia (I'm leaving school and want to be a child again!) and hallucinogens (I'm a child again!). Teletubbies are a perfect example.
For a modern equivalent: 'Yo-gabba-gabba'. I suspect the survivors of the modern schedule will be these types of programme, much more visceral, about dancing and laughing, as opposed to the Postgate-type shows, which are more cerebral.
Postman Pat????
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