Seeing Things By Oliver Postgate

The BBC nearly rejected The Clangers ­ who, you may remember, communicate with whistles ­ because of their crude language, and Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss is a conflation of an uncle of their creator, Oliver Postgate, and Bertrand Russell. These are just the sort of titbits I was hoping for from this autobiography but didn't want to plough through the first 200 pages to get to them. But Postgate describes his childhood, his imprisonment for conscientious objection, and his stints as a frustrated writer, political activist and inventor with the same charming mixture of gravity, naiveté and daft jokes that he used when telling all those children's stories on the telly. You can hear that voice reading it to you, that same one that overlaid a sepia image of yesteryear in Bagpuss and then brought it to colourised life.