if the Pogles are your bag (RIP Peter Firmin)

Not so long ago, hauntology scholar Richard J. Lockley-Hobson -  and doesn't that sound like the name a hauntology scholar ought to have? like one of those fictitious historians or independent researchers into the arcane and paranormal that Ghost Box quote on their releases! - not so long ago Richard produced a limited-edition run of adorable screen-printed tote-bags / cotton-shoppers in tribute to The Pogles, the magical 1960s children's stop-motion animation series created by Oliver Postgate and the late Peter Firmin (aka Smallfilms - as in The Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine etc etc). The bags quickly ran out, but another batch is coming soon, interested parties take note. Details to follow, for now here's Richard's account of how they came to be.

The story goes that the original series The Pogles was felt by the BBC to be too witchy and eldritch and unsettling for the tender eyes of  under-fives, so was quickly pulled.

But it came back in slightly toned-down form as Pogle's Wood. 

I remember loving the Pogles as a wee nipper but I've no idea whether I saw the original series or Pogle's Wood -  I think the latter, though (the "wood" feels part of the memory)

How weird that these - my earliest televisual memories, pretty much (along with Andy Pandy and Bill & Ben and Weed) are up there, preserved, in the senselessly ever-expanding pubic archive that is YouTube.

Not that I have had time to rewatch them, for longer than a few minutes, of course. 

I could drown in memory, if I just had the time. 

The Phil Zone, acerbic, on Technological Progress and Science-as-Saviour as the "tattered gospel" preached by BBC's Horizon -- which is really "one of the UK's top religious programmes"-- focusing specifically on an episode that extols "data mining":

"From what I can glean, data mining can apparently help mitigate petty crime in a city awash with crime and close to social collapse. It can shave additional profit from a financial system that is almost entirely built on numerical fictions and abstractions. It can possibly do something useful with preventing genetic illness if our health system doesn't collapse. It can map out a cosmos we're never going to visit.

"This is not exactly hypersonic airliners and moon bases, is it? What isn't acknowledged here is just how low science and technology's sights have fallen. Data mining should really be called data scavenging, depending as it often does on figures recorded decades, perhaps centuries ago. It also reveals that science itself is well into the scavenging phase of its arc of decline, where, like an uninspired Indie band, it increasingly has to look into the overlooked or unexamined corners of the past in order to locate fruitful possibilities."