Oliver Postgate and the Guild Socialist tradition
Oliver Postgate has died. There is an
excellent obituary by Philip Purser in today's
Guardian.
As Philip Purser points out, Oliver Postgate was born into the British left. His father,
Raymond Postgate, was a Communist in the early 1920s, before he wised up, mellowed, gently expanded and edited the
Good Food Guide. Oliver's auntie,
Margaret Postgate, married
G.D.H. Cole, the one twentieth century British socialist who managed to be somehow quintessentially Fabian and anti-Fabian at the same time. All three were active in the
Guild Socialist movement of the 1910s and early 1920s.
One of the great treats of parenthood is having an iron-clad excuse for revisiting one's childhood loves - or what one now imagines them to have been. And Oliver Postgate's
corpus is high up there amongst the things I have been busily revisiting with my son over the past two or three years. We have the DVDs of
Ivor the Engine,
The Clangers and
Bagpuss. We have a couple of
Noggin the Nog books.
Is there any connection between these classic children's TV programs and the sort of radical milieu which Oliver Postgate grew up in?
Philip Purser suggests as much, and Zoe Williams
explores the point further. I agree. The programs and books have a definite ethos, without ever being preachy.
In
Ivor the Engine, the characters are defined by their jobs ('Jones the Steam', 'Dai Station') and, although capitalist relations of production are there in the background, they clearly see their jobs in terms of simple good service to the community, rather like the imaginary good citizens of a Guild Socialist utopia. The community itself is a strong, but benevolent, force.
http://www.nextleft.org/2008/12/oliver-postgate-and-guild-socialist.html