The Clangers: A Mythic Whimsy in Stop-Motion

Postgate’s narration is the thread that binds this tapestry. His voice, warm yet tinged with irony, recalls the storyteller by the hearth, weaving tales that are both absurd and profound. He tells us what the Clangers say, but one suspects he embellishes, much as a poet might embroider a myth. A recent whisper, recorded in a leaked script recently surfaced, suggests that Major Clanger, in a moment of pique, once whistled, “Sod it, the bloody thing has stuck again,” though the kinder ear might hear, “Oh dear, the silly thing’s not working properly.” This is no mere jest but a revelation of The Clangers’ subversive heart. Beneath its knitted charm lies a flicker of defiance, a refusal to be wholly sanitised for the nursery. It is the same impulse I found in the myths of Crete or Wales, where the gods curse and stumble, their divinity no less for their flaws.

The animation, too, is a marvel of craft, its simplicity a rebuke to the slickness of modern spectacle. The Clangers are knitted puppets, their world built from Meccano and cardboard, animated frame by laborious frame. There is no pretence of seamlessness; the jerkiness of stop-motion is its own poetry, a reminder of the human hand behind the illusion. Peter Firmin’s designs—Soup Dragon, Iron Chicken, Froglets in a top hat—are as bizarre as anything in a medieval bestiary, yet they cohere in this lunar cosmos. The music, composed by Vernon Elliott, weaves through each episode, now mournful, now sprightly, a counterpoint to the whistles. It is not unlike the bardic harp, underscoring the tale without overwhelming it. In this, The Clangers achieves what my own poetry has often sought: a balance of the homely and the cosmic, the mundane and the mythic.

Yet what is the myth The Clangers tells? It is, I think, a myth of home, of community, of resilience in the face of the alien. The Clangers are a family—Major, Mother, Granny, Small, Tiny—bound by love and mutual exasperation, much like the households of Homer or the Welsh Mabinogion. Their adventures are small: a lost melody, a broken machine, a visitor from space. But in their smallness lies their universality. They are us, knitting our lives from the scraps of a world we did not choose, whistling our joys and sorrows into the void. Their planet, with its soup wells and music trees, is a pastoral idyll, yet it is no utopia. It is a place of work, of mending, of making do. In this, I see the shadow of my own war-haunted generation, rebuilding from the ruins, finding meaning in the ordinary.

There is, too, a quiet ecological note, though it is never preached. The Clangers recycle the debris that falls upon them, turning probes into contraptions, flags into tablecloths. They live lightly on their planet, sustained by the Soup Dragon’s bounty, asking little and giving much. In an age when we hurl our machines into the heavens, heedless of what they leave behind, this is a gentle rebuke. I am reminded of my Goodbye to All That, where I turned my back on the mechanised slaughter of the trenches. The Clangers turns its back, too, on the mechanised conquest of space, choosing instead the poetry of the small, the handmade, the communal.

For Encounter’s readers, accustomed to the weightier matters of politics and philosophy, The Clangers may seem a trifle. But trifles, as any poet knows, are the stuff of truth. In its ten-minute episodes, this series captures the eternal tension between the human and the divine, the earthly and the cosmic. It is a children’s show, yes, but it is also a mirror held up to our ambitions, our follies, our longing for home. To watch the Clangers whistle their way through their lunar day is to hear, faintly, the music of the spheres, filtered through the homely clatter of dustbin lids. It is to be reminded that myth is not only in the stars but in the soup we share, the songs we sing, the stubborn, knitted heart that endures.

In the end, The Clangers is a poet’s vision, a bard’s tale told in wool and whistle. It is Postgate and Firmin at their loom, weaving a mythology for an age that has forgotten how to dream. Let us listen, then, to the Clangers’ song, and find in it the echo of our own.

Robert Graves is a poet, mythographer, and semi-retired oracle broadcasting from Majorca, where he communes with the White Goddess, suspicious teapots, and BBC puppets. He believes all true mythologies are knitted, all true poetry is whistled, and that even a Soup Dragon may be a lunar priestess in disguise.

Note: This piece of writing is a fictional/parodic homage to the writer cited. It is not authored by the actual author or their estate. No affiliation is implied. Also, the Encounter magazine cover above is not an official cover. This image is a fictional parody created for satirical purposes. It is not associated with the publication’s rights holders, or any real publication. No endorsement or affiliation is intended or implied.

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