Clangers

–WHAT IS THE SECRET OF the blue star with metal covers on it?” This was the strange question with which viewers of BBC1 – or at least those who read Radio Times – were introduced to a strange and beguiling new alien world.

Clangers itself was thankfully somewhat more forthcoming. It began with an image of planet Earth, a common enough sight in those days of the Apollo space programme. This, we were told, was “our home”. “But supposing we look away from the Earth and travel, in our imagination, across the vast, starry stretches of outer space?” It was the voice of writer and animator Oliver Postgate, already familiar to at least one generation of young viewers thanks to children’s favourites like Pogles’ Wood, and . “Then we can imagine other stars, stranger stars by far than ever shone in our night sky. And planets too.”