Children’s TV classic The Clangers will return in a new £5m incarnation narrated by Michael Palin - but unlike the Teletubbies it will not be updated for the iPad generation.
The story of pink, knitted whistling space mice, complete with Soup Dragon and Iron Chicken, will return to the BBC nearly half a century after it first aired in 1969.
It is one of a wave of children’s TV series being remade for younger viewers, but unlike the Teletubbies, who will also return to CBeebies, complete with “touch screens” in their stomachs, it will not have any computer generated elements.
Daniel Postgate, son of its co-creator and original narrator, the late Oliver Postgate, said: “We didn’t want to update it in a way that the Clangers were using iPads or things like that. It still exists in this strangely non-specific period of time.”
The new 52-part series preserves the stop frame animation of the original, with six animators producing a minute a day in total.
Postgate said it was “not out of the question” that other classic shows from the same stable, which also made Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, and Noggin the Nog, could also return.
Monty Python star Palin said he was “proud and pleased” to be involved and told the new issue of Radio Times it was “one of the best things I’ve ever been offered”. The US version of the show will be narrated by Star Trek’s William Shatner.
Palin described his role on the show as “an observer, trying to work out what is going on. My favourite phrase is ‘Oh dear’, and ‘Oh dear’ comes up a lot in the drama of the episodes.”
Postgate said his father would “really like” the new version. “When I started working on stories I thought, ‘Everybody’s going to want it all pepped up and zingy.’
“But when I talked to the BBC they said, ‘That’s exactly what we don’t want’ ... and I thought, ‘Thank goodness for that.’”
