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Jonny Trunk, who with Richard Embray nurtured and compiled this book as an homage to the production company, describes how the two men worked at Firmin’s farm in Kent. Postgate wrote the scripts and filmed the animations in the main barn, while Firmin created the puppets and sets in a converted cowshed.

Together, often on a shoestring budget, they were endlessly resourceful and inventive, devising articulated skeletons for the puppets from bits of metal and wood, planets from polystyrene and plaster, and a home-made animation table using Meccano and bicycle chains. The book includes extracts from the book Seeing Things by Postgate, who died in 2008, together with contemporary reminiscences by Firmin.

Stewart Lee writes in the introduction that the art of Smallfilms is ‘not objectively perfectly finished in the way Buzz Lightyear is, but it is something you could hold and touch and, given time and effort, even make yourself. It inspires.’ And, beautifully photographed in close-up detail by Eva Herzog, the artefacts shown here really do inspire.

And so do the scripts. Through photos of individual pages, you get a glimpse of the skill behind the storytelling. Almost always, the dialogue has an easy rhythm and gentle humour. And, although paced for young children, the stories do not talk down to their audience. For example, in the opening scene for The Clangers (1969), the text for the narrator has a lilting fairy-tale cadence: ‘This planet, this cloudy planet, is the Earth. It is our home, the place where you and I live. But supposing we look away from the Earth and travel, in our imaginations, across the vast endless stretches of outer space. There we can imagine other stars, stranger stars by far then ever shone in our night sky, and other stranger people too. People perhaps whose civilization, skill and efficiency may be far in advance of ours.’ This is stirring stuff!

The book is a little like a scrapbook, sometimes with whole pages devoted to individual puppets, sometimes showing a collection of drawn heads or legs. Surprises emerge, too. We are told that The Clangers – who were memorably voiced by whistles – actually had proper dialogue written for them. And that Bagpuss was originally going to be a marmalade cat, until a fabric error changed him from orange into pink stripes.

For the story of a little film company, this is a large and heavy book (I supported it on a cushion while reading it). But it has a real warmth and does an excellent job of celebrating two creative and eccentric men (and their occasional collaborators) and their charming TV shows. As Stewart Lee says of Trunk’s delight in unearthing supposedly ephemeral material, it can often show us, ‘how slices of shared cultural history we had overlooked or dismissed are in fact utterly significant.’ That’s certainly true of the work of Smallfilms.

Clare Walters, journalist, author of children’s picturebooks, London

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