Bagpuss, Pingwings, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Pogles' Wood, were all made by Smallfilms, the company he set up with collaborator, artist and puppet maker Peter Firmin.

This qualified him to return to the Appellate Tribunal, where he was granted exemption conditional upon working on the land or in social service, the unserved portion of his sentence being remitted.

[6] On return to the UK, from 1948 he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but drifted through a number of different jobs, never really finding his niche.

[7] This resulted in the Firmin-produced characters looking as though they were short in one leg, but the success of the production provided the foundation for Postgate with Firmin to start up his own company solely producing animated children's programmes.

Smallfilms was therefore able to produce two minutes of film per day, ten times as much as a conventional animation studio,[9] with Postgate moving the cardboard pieces himself, and working his 16 mm camera frame-by-frame with a home-made clicker.

They started in 1959 with Ivor the Engine, a series for ITV about a Welsh steam locomotive who wanted to sing in a choir, based on Postgate's wartime encounter with Welshman Denzyl Ellis, who used to be the fireman on the Royal Scot.

This was followed by Noggin the Nog for the BBC, which established Smallfilms as a reliable source to produce children's entertainment, when there were only two television channels in the UK.

[10]In the 1970s Postgate and Firmin worked with Michael Rosen on a Teaching to Read series on BBC Schools TV called Sam on Boff's Island.

[12] In 1986, in collaboration with the historian Naomi Linnell, Postgate painted a 50-foot-long (15 m) Illumination of the Life and Death of Thomas Becket for a book of the same name, which is now in the archive of the Royal Museum and Art Gallery, Canterbury.

[18] Postgate's autobiography, Seeing Things, was published in 2000, and after Oliver died in 2008 his son Daniel wrote an afterword which was added at the end of the book.

He is distantly related to the Australian-born writer and academic Coral Lansbury, whose son Malcolm Turnbull became the 29th Prime Minister of Australia.

[19] After his death there was huge recognition of his influence and effect on British culture, and affection for the role his work had played in many people's lives.