Bagpuss is a British animated children's television series which was made by Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate through their company Smallfilms.

[3] Although only thirteen episodes were produced and broadcast, the programme remains fondly remembered,[4] and was frequently repeated in the UK until 1986.

Gabriel the toad, unlike most Smallfilms characters, could move by a special device beneath his can without the use of stop-motion animation.

The wooden woodpecker bookend became the drily academic Professor Yaffle (based on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whom Postgate had once met).

[6] Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner provided the voices of Madeleine and Gabriel respectively and put together and performed all the folk songs.

[4] Each programme begins in the same way: through a series of sepia photographs, the viewer is told of a little girl named Emily[9] who owns a shop.

She never sells any merchandise, but instead finds lost or broken objects and later displays them in the front window after they have been mended so their owners might come in and claim them.

Bagpuss yawns and goes to sleep, and the colour fades to sepia and the other toys freeze in place as the narrator says the following: And so their work was done.

In Firmin's words: "It should have been a ginger marmalade cat but the company in Folkestone dyeing the material made a mistake and it turned out pink and cream.

Scenes featuring him playing the banjo and singing would have taken quite a bit of time if filmed with the stop-frame method, so Peter Firmin created a mechanism that helped him control Gabriel through a hole in his can.

The character was based on a real toad that lived in the basement area of the flat that Peter and Joan rented in Twickenham beside the River Thames.

The BBC did not like the original character, a man in top hat made from black Irish bog oak, called "Professor Bogwood".

In April 2012, Marc Jenner from Tunbridge Wells in Kent ran in the Virgin London Marathon dressed in a 7-foot (2.1 m) Bagpuss costume to raise money for the charity, supported by Emily Firmin (seen in the programme's opening titles) and Postgate's family.

Gabriel's song in Episode 2 was the acknowledged inspiration for the album track (and first single) "There There" (originally titled "The Bony King of Nowhere").

[15] In 2009 Coolabi revealed that it had signed an “exclusive new option to develop and produce new content” based on Bagpuss, as they held the merchandising and distribution rights.

Bagpuss appeared on one of the twelve postage stamps issued by Royal Mail in January 2014 to celebrate classic children's programmes.