It feels slightly odd that the BBC has announced it is going to rework the 70s children's series The Clangers, in a new "technically improved" version costing £5m. Anyone who has been anywhere near a cinema over the past decade knows that we live in an age of 70s and 80s remakes. And yet, looking at an old episode of The Clangers, it's pretty clear that it's everything that children's TV in the 21st century isn't. It proceeds at a stately, rather meditative pace: compared with most of what is on CBeebies today, it feels like Last Year at Marienbad. It's both cryptic and melancholy, as evidenced by the original descriptions of episodes that appeared in the Radio Times: "The Cloud: There are no daffodils on the Clangers' planet, but it's not really as lonely as it looks."
In fact, from Vernon Elliot's soundtrack to the all-pervading atmosphere of isolation, it's a rather eerie programme. If it's nowhere near as nightmare-inducing as say, Children of the Stones or The Changes – drama series that had clearly been conceived with the express intention of scaring anyone who saw them witless – it's definitely a product of the same era. But set against the melancholy was a kind of natural warmth, largely derived from the fact that The Clangers was what you might politely call charmingly rustic in appearance. It looked like it was made in a shed. Which, of course, it was.
It's hard to see how you can bridge the gulf between The Clangers and what children expect from TV in the 2013, and harder still to see how you can have The Clangers without its co-creator, the late Oliver Postgate. The new version is being executive produced by his collaborator, Peter Firmin, and his son, Dan, who is also writing it. It's a hard heart that doesn't wish them all the best, but they don't have Postgate's narration, and, as Charlie Brooker once pointed out, Postgate's lulling voice was at the centre of his programmes' success: "It was hypnotic, your conscious seemed to alter slightly the moment he started to speak."
A friend of mine who worked with Postgate towards the end of his life put it another way. Every time he rang him, he said, he heard the voice that narrated The Clangers and Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss. "It's quite hard to have a conversation with him, because his voice is so powerful and evocative. It's like hearing God speak."
