Bagpuss

Bagpuss is a 'saggy, old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams' — the star of a gentle British children's television series made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate's Smallfilms company and first broadcast by the BBC in 1974. Remarkably, only thirteen episodes were ever produced, yet the pink-and-cream striped cat became one of the best-loved figures in the history of British children's television.

Each episode followed the same comforting ritual. A little girl named Emily would leave a lost or broken object in the window of her shop, and when Bagpuss woke up and yawned, the whole shop came to life around him: the carved wooden woodpecker Professor Yaffle, the mice on the 'mouse organ', and a rag doll called Madeleine. Together they would examine the object, tell its story in song, and mend it, before Bagpuss grew sleepy again and the whole shop settled back into stillness. The stop-motion animation, hand-made puppets, and folk-song interludes gave the programme a warm, hand-crafted quality quite unlike anything slick or modern.

Bagpuss's distinctive pink-and-cream stripes were actually a happy accident — the fabric was reportedly meant to be ginger but faded in the dye. In a 1999 BBC poll, Bagpuss was voted the most popular children's television programme of all time, cementing the sleepy cloth cat as an enduring symbol of a certain kind of cosy, imaginative British childhood.