While Bagpuss was originally made in 1974 it still remains hugely popular to this day. In a poll by the BBC in 1999, Bagpuss was voted, the nation’s most popular children’s TV show… not bad for a program made 25 years earlier!

Incredibly there were only ever 13 episodes of Bagpuss ever made. All the shows were made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate through their company Smallfilms. The programmes were made using a technique called “stop-frame animation”.

Bagpuss is an actual cloth cat, but was not intended to be such an electric pink. "It should have been a ginger marmalade cat but the company in Folkestone dyeing the material made a mistake and it turned out pink and cream. Bagpuss has now retired to the Rupert Bear Museum in Canterbury, UK (part of the Museum of Canterbury), together with Emily's shop window.

The Format
Bagpuss was “an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”, or at least that’s how he was introduced at the start of each show.  Each programme began the same way, through a series of sepia photographs, the viewer is told of a little girl named Emily (played by Emily Firmin, the daughter of illustrator Peter Firmin), who owned a shop.

The shop didn’t sell anything though. Instead, Emily would find lost and broken things and display them in the window of the shop, so their owners could one day come and collect them. She would leave the object in front of her favourite stuffed toy…  Bagpuss.  She would then recite a special verse to wake him up.

When Emily had left, Bagpuss would wake up. The scene shifted from sepia to colour stop motion film, and various toys in the shop would also come to life. Gabriel the toad and a rag doll called Madeleine were first. Then the wooden woodpecker bookend became the drily academic Professor Yaffle (distantly based, it is said, on the philosopher Bertrand Russell), while the mice carved on the side of the "mouse organ” woke up and scurried around, singing in high-pitched voices.

The toys would discuss what the new object was. Someone (usually Madeleine) would tell a story related to the object (shown in an animated thought-bubble over Bagpuss's head), often with a song, which would be accompanied by Gabriel on the banjo, and then the mice, singing in high pitched squeaky harmony as they worked, would fix the broken object.

The newly mended thing would then be put in the shop window, so that whoever had lost it would see it as they went past, and could come in and claim it. Then Bagpuss would start yawning again, and as he fell asleep the colour faded to sepia and they all became toys again.