Catherine: "Deceptively Simple"
Every episode of Bagpuss is essentially similar: Emily finds a thing, they sing a song about it, they fix it, they put it in the window. Deceptively simple.
The weight of repetition in each episode is exactly what five year olds dig the most, but repetition also fixes in the memory, which is why thirtysomethings are apt to start crying if they hear the words "Bagpuss, O Bagpss, old fat furry catpuss ..."
Those mice could teach the Teletubbies a thing or two.
Kim: "Warm-and-Fuzzies"
Childhood is over so quickly. Suddenly we turn around, and that fleeting innocence is gone. But like all lost things, there are places where we can refind those moments.
Bagpuss’ stories revolve around lost things - rescued by Emily, enlivened by the storytelling of a saggy old cloth cat, made whole by the gentle ministrations of the tiny mice.
The symbolism of things thought lost, yet redeemed through love surely stands for the succour and comfort we can still gain from the work of those colossi of children’s television, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin.
Nothing brings back the warm-and-fuzzies like Bagpuss.
Stephen: "Magic still shines"
There are some things best left to nostalgia. Old schoolmates, your first love, and the St Winnifred's School Choir. I was worried that watching Bagpuss after so many years would not cast same spell it conjured when I was a little boy.
No sooner had Bagpuss yawned (and his friends flickered from sepia into colourful life) than I was enrapt again. Proffessor Yaffle, the Mice, Madeleine, and Gabriel the banjo-playing toad had a 25 year old's full attention.
As a grown up I realise now how little Bagpuss, like most cats, actually does. The animation isn't as fluid as I remembered, but the magic still shines through.
Who doesn't glow upon hearing the immortal "just an old, saggy cloth cat. Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams, but Emily loved him"?
After all, we all did.
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