Happy Birthday Bagpuss

Of porridge, lost treasures, and a saggy old cloth cat

Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss

This week is the 50th anniversary of a much-loved BBC Children’s television series which aired in the UK in the mid-1970s. For those of you who are perhaps too young, or live outside of the UK and haven’t got the faintest clue who or what Bagpuss is, allow me to paint a sepia-toned picture:

From the annals of my own memory, Bagpuss is a large, soft and wonderfully lazy pink and white striped cloth cat who lives in a dusty bookshop with a young girl named Emily. He yawns in the most deliciously soporific way, embodying calm and cosiness, despite sharing his space with a stiff and grumpy wooden woodpecker called Professor Yaffle, and a load of extraordinarily helium-high pitched mice who run around singing ‘we will fix it’ and playing a church organ. It’s all strangely dreamy, changing as it does from sepia into ‘glorious technicolour’ à la Wizard of Oz when Emily leaves the saggy old cloth cat in the shop each day, and the adventures begin.

For me, it is a memory of comfort and blankets, yet for some reason tinged with a sadness I can’t define - perhaps because the characters never came alive when Emily was there and I wanted her to know them like I did. Perhaps because she didn’t seem to smile much, or because it was her shop and she was a young girl and I never understood where her parents were…

Yet overridingly, it is soothing and innocent and wondrous and nostalgic in the most perfect way.

In that way peculiar to children’s TV, the story was the same yet different every day, (as I write, I realise how this applies to so many childhood television memories, the formulaic simplicity belying the wonder of the output) with the familiar opening sequence underwritten by a strangely melancholy magical folk soundtrack. The words of the introduction setting the scene for the enchanting tale to come:

‘Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl and her name was Emily, and she had a shop.

There it is.

It was rather an unusual shop because it didn’t sell anything…you see…everything in that shop was a thing that somebody had once lost, and Emily had found, and brought home to Bagpuss. Emily’s cat, Bagpuss: the most important, the most beautiful, the most magical saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world…’

Each episode would centre on a new ‘lost’ item that was brought back to the shop, tended to by the slightly anxiety-inducing mice, and woven into a story before being placed in the window alongside the comfort that is Bagpuss…just in case someone may walk past and recognise it.

I have no idea what children’s television is/was like in other countries, but in the UK it was strangely trippy a lot of the time. I think the programme makers must have had a ball. There are long analyses on other TV favourites of the 1970s so I won’t write myself into that rabbit hole, but programmes of this generation do have a peculiar timelessness.

It reminds me of porridge

As I write this piece whilst delighting in watching clips of Bagpuss on YouTube - Taz and Fiver enter the room, their eyes lighting up at the sight of the saggy old cloth cat. I’m surprised by their level of recognition and joy, so I venture: ‘do you actually remember Bagpuss?!’ and receive the classic ‘teenage disdain’ half-mast eye response. Of course they know Bagpuss. Not from the 70s, clearly, but it turns out I had introduced them to it as youngsters - we had the DVD apparently. I smile inwardly at the level to which I have blocked out the toddler years…

‘So tell me then, what does Bagpuss make you think of?’

Taz: ‘it reminds me of porridge and makes me feel safe’

Fiver: ‘it reminds me of being in the back of the car on long car journeys - of ballerina shoes, sticky orange juice, the way they used to fix things, and a bottle with a ship inside it’.

Wow. I have no idea what Fiver is talking about.

I am fascinated by their level of memory, and totally scrunched up inside by the reference to porridge and of feeling safe. [That is a strong association in our house: Himself. Porridge. Safe.]

Yes, Bagpuss is all of those things.

We decide to settle down on the sofa together under a blanket and watch a couple of episodes whilst I write. At fifteen minutes per show, they are the perfect length to slot into our constantly distracted lives. Sure enough, in the first episode, Emily finds a broken ship in a bottle, and brings it to Bagpuss. In the next one, there is a ballet shoe…and some sticky orange juice…who knew?

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss. Old, fat furry catpuss, wake up and look at this thing that I bring!

…soothes Emily.

(We note that it may not be acceptable to call him ‘fat’ these days.)

And as we watch, the most exciting thing happens…’as when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up too!!’

Sorry, I am getting slightly carried away.

I see the other characters that my memory had sidelined - Madeleine the rag doll (I never was one for dolls), Gabriel the toad who I am struggling to remember at all, until he picks up his banjo and then something unlocks deep in my memory - weird how music does that. There’s the fact that Professor Yaffle was of course, a book-end, and the mice were ornaments on the marvellous mechanical mouse organ. Aah yes, of course. As the mice wind up THE MARVELLOUS MECHANICAL MOUSE ORGAN (for it must be shouted), I notice that Taz and Fiver are beaming with child-like anticipation, and realise that I am too. A story is about to unfold.

As we watch, and Fiver narrates everything that’s about to happen in some kind of (literal) dejà vu, I ask the girls how they feel now.

‘Warm, calm, safe.’

I’ll take that.

We all need a story

I am struck once more by the power of storytelling, even the simplest of tales, and the comfort that accompanies repetition. In each episode there is a broken item, a problem that needs fixing, and Bagpuss and friends need to create a magical story to bring the item back to life. We hear of the owls of Athens and the elephant who lost his ears, a kindly witch and a wise man, a magic fiddle and a broom that clears cobwebs from the sky. And, of course, a ship in a bottle and some ballet shoes.

[Although something about ballet shoes is also always tinged with sadness for me. I never did ballet after being cast as a flower in Bo Peep aged 5 because I wasn’t good enough to be a sheep; but something about ballet shoes makes me feel the deep agony of being female: the veneer of beauty stretched like taut clingfilm over the underlying agony, the strive to meet some patriarchally derived ideal of femininity, the brutal juxtaposition of the pointe blocks against the soft silk and countless other analogies…but I digress…]

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

I don’t recall Bagpuss as a programme being so formulaic, or so short. In my childhood memory it is a landscape of endless wonder and adventure, yet is was simply thirteen episodes of fifteen minutes each (probably with only five minutes of changed content in each one!) The quality of the charming ‘stop motion’ animation matters not, the reassurance lies in the repetition.

And then it falls into place. There is safety in predictability. Children (and adults) thrive on predictability. When we are thrown into situations where we walk on eggshells, don’t know what to expect, have to constantly adjust and readjust, we live on edge… and that is not a comfortable place to be. Adrenaline firing, primed for fight or flight and all that…it’s exhausting at best. Suddenly it makes complete sense why repetition is so comfortable. It’s all very well gearing up for frights when you’re having a teenage sleepover with girlfriends, popcorn and ‘The Exorcist’ on in the background, but in our day to day, we do not want to fire those synapses, we want to feel ‘warm, calm, safe’.

Enter Bagpuss.

When Taz and Fiver were of the age where I used to love Bagpuss, their equivalent was a programme called ‘In the Night Garden’. Thankfully I managed to just about swerve the TellyTubby years as those things used to properly freak me out, but give me Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy any day. As a frazzled mum, it was extraordinary to observe the way this programme would settle my babies - and again it was down to repetition. Just as sure as Sesame Street would have a letter of the day, In the Night Garden would see Upsy Daisy making her bed and Iggle Piggle sailing off into wherever it was he went...in the same way, every single day. This was not only deeply soothing for my babies, but also for me as a mother living on the fringes of coping (as all mothers do).

No wonder we fear change!

My Bagpuss

Fast forward a decade or three and I was gifted a Bagpuss that could be heated in the microwave. A saggy old cloth cat that was warm and smelt of popcorn, or porridge…He became our emblem of safety and we would pass him around between us as our hearts needed. How perfect. Sadly, that beloved item met its demise during a rodent infestation in our house that we still do not speak of out loud (sssshhhhhh) as there were also many other cuddly toy casualties (they had been ‘gathering’ together in a loft space, it was a cotton wool stuffed massacre of the highest order. I’m still not ready to go there).

I didn’t realise quite how much we all missed that Bagpuss until Christmas Day just gone (2023), when my sister gave me an alarmingly large package as a present. I was slightly perplexed as we had already ‘done’ presents prior to Christmas and I wasn’t expecting a gift from her. I opened the paper tentatively, thinking - ‘fuck, what should I have bought her?’ - and inside, there was a beautiful, pink and white striped (not yet saggy) cloth cat.

My very own Bagpuss, that she had knitted by hand over six months. Wow.

This Bagpuss has no air of melancholy in the slightest. He happily nestles with our ‘porridge’ cushion in the day, and at night, will be brought upstairs by any one of us because…

“…of course when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too.”

Of course.

He has become part of our family, just like Taz’s ‘Big Fat Panda’, Fiver’s ‘Bunny and Penguin’, and my heffalump; Bagpuss reminds us of predictability, stability, and although he is ‘baggy and a bit loose at the seams’, we, like Emily, love him.

…yawn….

Night night x

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Do you have a favourite children’s TV memory?

Or a cuddly toy that embodies these feelings for you?

How does Bagpuss make you feel? Whether you know him from your own memory or just from this piece!

I’d love to know

As always, please do comment below

Love & lemons 💕🍋

Em xxx