4th of April, 2020
This piece was originally published on the website RateYourMusic.com. The site only offers the ability to review music and film, but since all my work was already there and I had found friends and a very small audience there I decided to carry on posting my written work there.
Clangers is my favourite television series, and if RateYourMusic included TV shows it would be in my 5 Stars alongside the most important works of my life. It's a very simple children's television show from 1969 about a bunch of little mice like aliens called Clangers who live inside a small, rocky moon. The show is a stop motion animation by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, the characters are all portrayed by hand sewn puppets. They get up to little adventures.
A few months back I was once at a party, quite drunk, talking to a bunch of people who are old enough to remember actually watching the show as it aired. They seemed baffled both that someone my age would be so passionate about such an old children's show and baffled that someone of my temperament (the guy who has a reputation for liking impenetrably weird shit) would be so in love with something so simple. I've struggled to find an elegant way of describing why I love the show many times in the past. Not because I think it's too difficult to describe, I mean literally struggled to get out the words. On this occasion I decided to use the first episode as an example of what there is to love about Clangers.
Major Clanger, the family patriarch, has just tested out his new invention, a flying machine. After a great deal of effort in building it, it fails spectacularly, endangering his life as the test pilot and crashing heavily, destroying his work. He goes home, dejected. There, in the underground moon burrow, we meet his family. His two young children, Small Clanger and Tiny Clanger, are sent to help cheer their father up by getting him some soup. They both get on a little scooter and make a short trip over to see one of the denizens of the moon, the Soup Dragon. The Dragon kindly gives them some soup from her underground well, and they return triumphantly. This is all simple enough, right? In trying to relay these words to the people around me, I had to concentrate on keeping back tears. Everybody there knew I was trying not to cry. Writing it now has made me well up. What the fuck?
Some sort of magic runs through the image I described. As simply as possible, we are shown two young children going on a short journey, totally free of tension and danger, to help their father. They may be sewn puppets of alien mice, their movements may be jerky, and the film may be grainy and dim. Those things are important as a framework for delivering the purity of the image. Two children are doing an act of kindness for their father. That is an image that is a fact. Those little mice were sewn by Peter Firmin's wife, and they live on a little moon with dustbin lids over the craters. The scooter they use has wheels that look rather like deflated sponges—it couldn’t possibly deliver anyone anywhere. The propulsion system for the scooter is Small Clanger pushing it along the ground with a barge pole. It’s just a funny image, but thinking about the way that silly looking thing bears those funny looking mice on their way makes me heart ache. God made those wheels flop around uselessly. God is in that scooter.
I don’t love Clangers because it is symbolic of a better time of innocence and purity. Frankly, I don’t remember how I felt watching Clangers as a child. Back then it wasn’t even among my favourite TV shows I don’t think, which might be surprising to anyone reading this who might have suspected the actual piece of art I am describing is loved by me only as a proxy—something that I love arbitrarily because it's the prop in my life that I use as my symbol for childhood. I think the reason I love Clangers is that it’s just about Love. Pain and other shades are complex, and to impart them in a way that produces something true and beautiful requires an intelligent balancing of tension. Love and joy are relegated in serious art too often because they can’t be arrived at simply by being clever. When an artist tries to impart joy and fails they produce a dissonant symbol of real happiness that repulses us, or they second guess themselves and involve that joy in an unbalanced tension that perverts it. To impart joy in a totalising, Godly way, art should be innocent and monist. Clangers is that.