YouSaid · the spoken record

Oliver Postgate

lines on the record: 51
first: 2007-07-15
most recent: 2007-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would like a huge book of all English poetry,'cause I never gave it enough time in my life, and I regretted that I could spend a lot of time looking through and enjoying the things I've missed.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when you go to a desert island and you are alone, all your ghosts and all the blames and all the follies, the mistakes and the regrets, the tokoing stupidities we've been talking about, they come crowding in with you from the past. So I shall have to find a way to turn on them and turn on the hold aft world and tell it to get stuffed and there's only one record for that.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to keep any of these things if I hadn't needed to keep doing things to prove that I existed. I regard it as an illness. I regard it as a personality fault that I'm able to do these things. I'm delighted to be able to do the things and the things that please me now tremendously when I see them.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm told that this is so, yes, but it doesn't work it hasn't got rid of the witch's gift I received when I was very young, which was that everything you do is essentially chancey and wrong. You should have settled down and learn to trade.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, just being logical, but it's not the English thing you do. You are modest about it, you know, and say Oh I was lucky or something, but I'm actually I look back on the things I've done and I enjoy them it doesn't nourish me I want to go and do something else”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because I was the machine, I was a mechanism, I was the means by which you said I'm a verb, not a noun, I am a means for doing it. People say to me I enjoy that bag was filmed tremendously the one about the Hamish. I said yes, did you see the mouse mill? That was good as well. He's a big headed bastard, they think. It's nothing to do with me. It's a thing. It exists in its own right.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you a doting grandfather? No, indeed, absolutely not. I am the remains of a working machine and I still work. And what I hate about old age is this tremendous lack of time and skill I take twice as long to do everything I used to do, and I do it wrong now and have to do it again and I get furiously angry with myself because I've lost so many of my faculties, but nevertheless I keep on doing it and in the end it gets done. People say to me why don't you lie back on your laurels? I say what would I bloody do if I lay back on my laurels they're prickly my children thank goodness have got used to it now and they come to me when they want to talk about something important but the idea of being a doting article to furniture around the edges is they've given that ambition up now.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one thing I dread the moment everything goes quiet I begin to sink like a stone Naomi says the same as Prue, you only get yourself a project”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well this was a piece I found cried For Prue actually, funnily enough, I came across it shortly before she died, which was 25 years ago now, and brought it to her and she loved it very dearly. This is”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was yes, yes, it was it was also because we had so long to face the facts, you see my mother, you see, some years before had committed suicide because she was fed up with life after my father died, and we were deeply, profoundly grieved by this because she didn't tell us. She sent us away for the weekend to our cottage in Wales, and she was still alive when I got back, but I said to the doctor. She didn't want to go on, so being an ancient Greek, not anything else. She took her pills and and that was her right, and nobody nobody said she was making any mistake there, but it was just the suddenness of it.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'd had our last year and we mourned together, you know, as best we could, and she said, Don't be a celibate, you know, don't keep faith with me. Get out and get on with it And I did but I made a complete fool of myself because I didn't know any of the rules of romantic behaviour and all sorts of mistakes were made, some of which wake me up in the middle of the night curling with embarrassment, but eventually I met Naomi who was historian who worked for the cathedral in Canterbury and we became close friends and eventually lovers and are now together very happily twenty years nearly now.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did, we managed to wrestle another four years from the gods. No, she, I remember she came to me and said, look, I'm terribly sorry I've got cancer. And I remember thinking there's not something to be sorry about it. But to be sorry, yes, but I mean not to apologise for, you know. And A difficult time because she was suffering very badly from manic depression at the same time, so she was either on top of the world or completely down, and I discovered that I couldn't put myself aside from it. I didn't want to. I went down with her, and when she was really manic, I just had to hide sometimes because it didn't make sense, but other times I was there to help. It was a happy time on a certain level.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very probable that she did she was very subtle lady and The effect of falling in love with her was to make me feel able to do absolutely anything, you know. It's a marvellous feeling.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crew had never entertained that aspect of my life which was that I wasn't sure that I was going to succeed she knew perfectly well I was going to succeed and hadn't time to be bothered with any other ideas and I went along with this and it was true for a while and”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, funny enough it goes back in my mind after the war in that very, very, very cold winter, and I think what I shall miss on this desert island where it's really hot, I shall miss the cold. I shall miss the exhilaration of riding out in the Droski with a gang of comrades to see the sun on the snow, and the green buds sprouting on the silver birches, and being able to breathe in great lungfuls of the icy air, and know that the winter is over at last. That's what this particular record does for me, though I don't know a word of Russian.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh I would move back into one of my created worlds very happily, but you're offering to do that for me today. I'm looking forward to it.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he's not my own anxiety, the world is so damn stupid that it is going to collapse if I'm not careful, and I keep trying to do things about it, but it doesn't happen, doesn't work.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The BBC I walked in one day and said I want to do an election broadcast on behalf of the poor bloody electors. So they said yes, all right, do it if the gods let us play it, they will, and they did.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mid 70s, were they safe and reasonable times? Anything about my parents both died within weeks of each other, and suddenly I was out on my own. I hadn't realised the extent to which when I went in my imaginary world I left my father in charge of the real world. Suddenly he was no longer there as a referee and I realized I was having to think about the world the real world and I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all and I was tremendously frightened. The winter of discontent when the miners fighting political doctrine battles with Edward Heath government and so on, and I had been in Germany during the Grossnapite during the nineteen forty seven cold winter and I'd known that a civilization could collapse and I got really frightened and I forced myself onto women's hours.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, no, no, no, no idea, neither of us had Peter Peter had intended Bagpus to be an Indian army cat somewhere above Puna in the children's hospital where he would tell stories to children, and I said I'm not having a studio full of children. I can handle puppets but not children so he decided to live in the window of Emily's shop and we found that the key to it was the fact that each time Emily brought something home it gave us the inspiration for its story so I can remember taking a pink elephant without any ears to Peter and dumping it down in front of him and saying well what is the story of this? And that would provide the sort of seed for the originality, you see. Other stories I've had to pull out of the sky completely from nothing, you know. But now there was a pink elephant started with, you see.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well I suppose I'll have to take something with me to remind me of all those years I spent pushing bits of card along with a pin, but all the pieces of music were composed for me by Vernon Elliot, and like all of them this one goes with a picture which I'll tell you about it comes from the saga of Noggin and the ice dragon and the Nogs are settling down to sleep in a high valley. But Graculus, the great green bird, is disturbed. He looks out and knows that behind the mountains there is a lake with green trees around it, and there are fish blue fish. He also knows that he has never been there since he was hatched, but Nogin says go and see for perhaps your egg remembers what it never saw, and there you will find your home.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no I had no idea about the children, never gave them a thought, having an infantile mind I liked the ideas either the engine, the Welsh engine that wants to sing in the choir. I mean it had overtones of Dylan Thomas, it had overtones all sorts for grown ups, and also it was an amusing story for the children at the same time. But the point about it was if you did things solely intended for the kiddy winks, you were insulting them because children, I believe learn by picking up fag ends. You know, they want to be round the edges of adult life and pick things up.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had very brightly lit table, and the flies were just land in the middle of the picture, you know, and I would be going along quite happily filling notice of a blue bottle wandering about. So for a tenth of a second there's a blue bottle wandering across the picture, and I would have to reshoot the whole shot or else leave it in'cause nobody noticed.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in a total mess. I've always worked in a total mess anyway. I built the animation table myself. Wasn't air conditioned, it was anything but air conditioned. It was a slightly enlarged pig style, and in winter time I had this coke stove which belched forth fumes and in the summer it became intolerably hot, and I was moving over the engine frame by frame along with a sharpened screwdriver and clicking the button so on and the sweat would be running down my hands and I had to wear little bands round my wrists to stop it running down onto the artwork.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No absolutely not. The art which I had was how to make films for ten pounds a minute, for the television which was hungry for whatever it could get, and some of the early films have the worst animation you ever seen in your life, but it doesn't matter because the story is so nice.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, throughout my life I loved jazz and I really really liked slightly constructed jazz, but this particular piece I'm very devoted to.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We couldn't afford anything else at ten pounds a minute for the finished film we had to use what we could use. I had been an actor, you see, for a while, so I was used to performing, as you might call it, but only later when we started getting properly paid for the work we were able to afford actors. But even then I kept on doing the narration and everything else because it seemed to work.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had a large family to keep, and I had a large family to keep, and we had work to do. So we got on with it. And our life was spent in. Dispute it was if he was my brother in a sense because we argued fiercely all the time people said those two can't ever work together again, but the moment the subject we were arguing about was finished with nothing remained we were still friends.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of well, quite simply, I was attached to the children's department at ITV, and I looked at what they were producing, thought well, I could do better than that. So I went away and wrote a story called Alexander the Mouse, the mouse born to be king, and at the same time the company had adopted a completely mad form of magnetic animation, and so I found Peter Fermin, who was an artist, he was a bit dubious about making these cardboard mice to be moved about with magnets, especially because if you approach them from underneath the table, if you've got the magnet the wrong way round they would leap in the air and turn upside down, which occasionally happened on the program, so I had to reach in a hand into the picture and turn it over, and thank goodness nothing was ever recorded because it went out on the air.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I wasn't just feeding my own ego or anything like this. I had really got to enough money to keep four other people, you know, so I immediately went and worked for the television as a stage manager at the time.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met Prue, and she had already got three children. And suddenly there was somebody who accepted me as I was and was happy with me.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a thing for doing things. I was brought up to think of myself as inferior. I didn't exist unless I was doing something, unless I could show that I had achieved something, so I was forced into neurotic achievement almost. And Pru used to say to me If there was no sausage going through it minced itself,”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I think stuck on a hot sandy island I shall miss certain peacefulnesses sitting by a woodland pool on the summer evening and looking at the dust flittering on the surface and watching the dragonflies among the reeds something which we wouldn't get on a desert island.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In reality, I assure you I made her one of the first food mixers. They all worked, but they had their minor disadvantages, but they've all turned up in the world since I'm happy to say.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, these were fortuitous, I can remember my poor mother with the washing machine. There weren't any washing machines about, and I made her one out of a milk churn, but'cause I couldn't make the sort of gland to keep the water in, I had to rotate the entire frame back and forwards. It washed beautifully, but it had this strange habit of wandering, so that she would switch it on and nip out of the scullery, and she never knew where it was going to get to, and sometimes she would come back and hear it knocking against the door as it was trying to get out, and then one day it managed to turn itself over and it died in a heap of bubbles and all the lights in the house went off.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I refused to fight. In general terms, I have this reservation that I was not entitled to be righteous. The world didn't belong to me, and yes, as you say, I am, in a sense, a guest.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My brother said, in passing there's no reason why we should feed you, is there? This is when they were bringing food in from abroad and I said there's none”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got my call out papers and I said I'm not coming but I will present myself for arrest at the Cumbermere Barracks in Windsor till eleven AM on a Thursday and I can remember arriving there and I hadn't told the man in the guard house about it and he showed you come to sign up then I said no I've come not to sign up actually He said look wouldn't you have done better doing that somewhere else I said no, he said well all right then So this rather nice well brought up eaten educated officer came in and said Well what's the drill, old man? Can you tell me what do we do with you? I said I think you have to put me into custody then he said I don't want to do that to a chap. I said no I don't think you've got any alternative really said well we won't lock the door will that be all right? I then had to sort of lead them through the process and it was marvellously English.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, that's right, and he'll put me in touch with the Quakers, and they told me how to go through the process of becoming a conscientious objector, which I found the army didn't really know about”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very difficult. I was fairly firmly convinced that Hitler was a phenomenon of the Versailles Treaty, that the way which Germany had been treated at the end of the First War was the cause of the discontent that gave rise to Hitler, and that if we had another one, then the wheel would turn again and there would be another fifty million people killed twenty five years later, and it seemed to me at the time that to join in was wrong. I mean, I think I was wrong in doing it because in practice the wheel did not turn again.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well, I can remember from my first school we used to sing English traditional songs, and I liked them very much I loved them and I sang all the time. This is one of them, but this version isn't quite the same as the one we used to sing.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By that education, you are in a sense to some degree it was, but that was original that was there already. It could have been fostered by another school, and I might have become something useful instead of what I am. But I'm rather glad I didn't.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very powerful on me having Deprived of self discipline completely I still in my eighties have a fight with myself to make myself do something I don't fancy at any time.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty well, I couldn't find anything to join in with I'd been in an ordinary school in which there was a hierarchy of some sort. I was a member of a house and somebody cared what you did. The essential thing about Darlington was that it was theory led and you were required expected to do what you fancied. So if I went to somebody and say what shall I do now they would say Well what you want to do and I would say I don't want to do anything except what I ought to be doing and they would say no no you must do always do what you want to do and I didn't want to do anything at that time I wanted to join in It's a very good school for goats but it's no good for sheep you see and I'm a sheep It was one of the unhappiest periods of my life.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I appeared to be an errant show off all the time trying to draw attention to myself and everything else, but this was an upside down effect. I just simply wanted somebody to admit that I existed, and so I really had either complete confidence based on the fact that of a complete absence of confidence. I do hope I'm making sense.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ray my father was a rather distant figure, but he was very friendly, and Daisy, my mother, was a very important part of my life, but not the time she wasn't there, and John and I were regarded as a general nuisance, I think, as indeed we were in a tiny little box of a house in Hendon”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They weren't prominent exactly, but they were very political, that's right. My grandfather was George Lansbury, who was leader of the Labour Party in nineteen thirty five and a pacifist and a great socialist, and my mother was his secretary, so she used to take us to the House of Commons occasionally, and we heard him speak, which is marvelous. I couldn't understand a word they were talking about, but it was a lovely sound. My father was editor of Tribune, which was left wing weekly paper at the time, and we were deep in the movement in a sense, but of course all that meant was that my parents were rather absent most of the time.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh well, if I go to this desert island of yours I shall need something to wake me up in the morning and tell me that life is still worth living so the bath festival orchestra playing part of Brandenburg concerto number two in F major.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had my animation table and all these pieces of cardboard which were the limbs of the people involved in it, and I was pushing them along with a pin and pressing the button on the camera. in the hope of getting about one hundred and twenty seconds of film out in a day. Now, more recently have discovered that the average animation studio gets two seconds a day out and considers it done well.”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes really we didn't have time to think about that We didn't realise Peter Fermin was my colleague we were feeding the television machine We just worked and we thought up stories and we didn't really think about them being anything except fun and”
2007-07-15 · Desert Island Discs · Oliver Postgate · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source