The Clangers

Oliver Postgate described the original Clangers as ‘a small tribe or extended family of civil mouse-like persons living their peaceful lives on, in and around a small, undistinguished moon’.

Their planet in the opening sequence was made by Peter out of plaster shaped around a plastic football, with the main sets modelled in a mixture of polystyrene and plaster. The background was a painted sky decorated with stars with a few Christmas decorations to add a bit of fantasy, and the Iron Chicken was made of Meccano. The series was created using the painstaking stop-motion animation method (a style preserved in the 2015 CBeebies revival). The characters made tiny movements in each shot, and then appeared to move when the film was run together (think of the way a flick book works).

The Clangers is the longest running Smallfilms series and on display in be Smallfilms Gallery are puppets m from the original and more recent series, elements of sets, sketches, character-designs, scripts and a variety of other material.