Stop-motion animated children's series made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate, following a saggy cloth cat and his companions in a Victorian curiosity shop, first broadcast on BBC1 from 12 February to 7 May 1974. Each episode follows the same ritual. Through sepia photographs, the viewer meets Emily, a little girl who owns a shop where she displays found or broken objects so their owners might reclaim them.
She places each new object before Bagpuss, a large pink-and-white striped cloth cat, recites a short verse, and leaves. Bagpuss wakes, the film shifts from sepia to colour, and the shop's inhabitants come to life: six mice who scurry around the mouse organ, a rag doll named Madeleine, Gabriel the toad, and the pompous wooden woodpecker bookend Professor Yaffle, based by Postgate on the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The object is discussed, a story told, a song sung, and the mice set about mending whatever Emily has brought in.
At the episode's end, Bagpuss yawns, the colour drains back to sepia, and everything returns to stillness. Firmin made Bagpuss as an actual cloth cat, though the vivid pink colouring was an accident: the Folkestone dyer tasked with producing a ginger marmalade cat got it wrong, and the result, in Firmin's own words, was "the best thing that ever happened". Gabriel the toad was the only character who could move without stop-motion, controlled through a mechanism beneath his can; he had originally been made for Firmin's live ITV programme The Musical Box.
The BBC rejected the original Professor Yaffle, a figure in a top hat carved from black Irish bog oak called Professor Bogwood, on the grounds that he was too frightening. Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner voiced Madeleine and Gabriel respectively and performed all the folk songs; Postgate voiced every other character and narrated. In a 1999 BBC poll, Bagpuss was voted the nation's favourite children's television programme.
A film adaptation was announced in September 2025, to be produced by Threewise Entertainment with a planned release in 2027.
Production Details
UK / BBC - Smallfilms / 13x15 Minute Episodes / 1974
Created by: Peter Firmin, Oliver Postgate
Directors: Oliver Postgate
Music: Sandra Kerr, John Faulkner
Main Cast
Oliver Postgate as Bagpuss / Narrator / Professor Yaffle and others
Sandra Kerr as Madeleine
John Faulkner as Gabriel
