Engine Punk

Everybody I talk to about Oliver Postgate reckons he was on drugs. I think this says more about the chattering classes than dear old Oliver. They obviously don't understand what it is to have an imagination. Some of us - and I include myself and the late and great Mr Postgate - don't need drugs to think wonderful thoughts. A few years ago I read his autobiography, Seeing Things , and this confirmed my already high opinion of him. I'd grown up on Ivor the Engine and Bagpuss and can still remember the anticipation that the prospect of a new Oliver Postgate brought me and my sister late one Sunday afternoon when we visited our grandparents. It all started for me with Pogle's Wood . Mr and Mrs Pogle lived a wood in an old tree stump. Mr Pogle would go out and have some sort of adventure, whereupon they would wake up The Plant, a kind of talking tulip that grew outside their front door, by pouring farmhouse cider over his roots. The Plant would then tell them a st...