US Edition 
Clangers, episode one, review: 'sanitised'
The Clangers are back but they've lost their melancholy, says Benji Wilson
Why do they remake the classics of children’s TV?
It can’t be for the children – in my house, at least, they don’t care what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 30 years ago. No, children’s TV gets remade for the parents. They’re the ones who control the remote and they’re much more likely to give in to pleas for just one more episode before bedtime if it’s an episode of something that brings back warm, furry, probably illusory memories of their own childhoods.
(Photo: BBC/Coolabi, Smallfilms and Peter Firmin)
With that in mind it seems fair to review the new version of Clangers (CBeebies), the stop-motion story of five knitted mice who live on another planet and communicate only in the plangent tones of the swanee whistle, through an adult’s eyes, as it was meant for me anyway.
My recollections of Clangers meld into my recollections of Ivor the “pier-shtee-coff” Engine and Bagpuss the old saggy cloth cat, because all three were voiced by Oliver Postgate. You are supposed to think of Postgate’s voice as a comfy jumper of calm, but even as a child I always found it sinister (then again, I found most things quite sinister, that lugubrious MI6 plant Bagpuss especially).
To me, Postgate sounded like the man in the Post Office queue barely maintaining control over his anger, just one misplaced stamp away from laying waste to the packaging concession.
(Photo: BBC/Coolabi, Smallfilms and Peter Firmin)
Postgate died in 2008 and has been replaced in this new version by Michael Palin, yet I have to say that the new Clangers is worse for Postgate’s absence. It’s not Palin’s fault, but the old series had a likeably despondent edge. It was – rightly – sceptical of what humans were doing to the galaxy.
It quite often began with a Postgate homily reminding all those grinning three-year-olds out there that humanity was small and meaningless in the context of a vast, indifferent universe. It regularly mentioned death.
New Clangers is essentially a direct remake with the same characters but much better animation – modern stop motion hardly looks like it’s stopping at all. Yet what it now lacks is that slightly sad pungency. Its story in episode one, about the search for a missing melody, offered up a metaphor for some old Clangers-style melancholia, but opted not to use it, instead just telling the story deadbolt straight.
Of course, the kids won’t care, and sales of knitted mice should peak just in time for Christmas. But it’s another example of how children’s TV has become sanitised, just like so much else in children’s lives.
(Photo: BBC/Coolabi, Smallfilms and Peter Firmin)