Comments on: Postgate Poll: Ivor surges ahead!

By: Jennie

Jennie — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:12:36 +0000

What Joe said.

By: Joe Otten

Joe Otten — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:08:11 +0000

Furthermore I worry about the extent to which TtTE teaches the importance of deference to the Fat Controller; the enforcement of sex and class stereotypes: that coaches are all female and need to be cosseted and trucks are all working class and need to be treated harshly. The racist epithets may have been edited out of more recent editions, but the conservative idyll remains.

By: Jennie

Jennie — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:25:43 +0000

Much as I hate to disagree with the Award Winning Alix Mortimer, I’m with the gravelly-voiced sex-pot on this one. Ivor is awesome. Look at his subversiveness when faced with a load of fox-hunting toffs! No illiberal and impractical banning from Ivor; he rescues the fox and lets the toffs get on with being toffy…

By: Alix

Alix — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:48:35 +0000

I am likewise disbelieving. That we should come to such a schism! Ivor’s being about “relationships” was half the problem – a pedestrian soap opera to Bagpuss’ rich gallimaufrey of myth, song, history and story-telling. I never thought I’d hear such a thing from the Blogger of the Year*.

*I see how this could backfire.

By: James Graham

James Graham — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:32:45 +0000

I can’t believe I’m reading such drivel from someone normally so sensible. A ‘poor man’s Thomas the Tank Engine’?! Thomas is almost exactly as you describe; Ivor is about as far from it as a children’s animation about steam trains can possibly be.

Thomas would never have joined the village choir, for one thing. Thomas was all about adventures while Ivor was all about relationships, but with a magic realist twist.

By contrast, I hate to say it, the whimsy in Bagpuss could at times be quite laboured. And Bagpuss was such an inveterate liar. A pink paper tiger, if you will.

By: Alix

Alix — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:23:02 +0000

I will, however, make an exception for Idris the Dragon, and Dai’s embodiment of all bureaucracy, thus:

“Livestock must be conveyed in the appropriate container.”

By: Alix

Alix — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:21:01 +0000

I’m astonished at Ivor’s supremacy – the poor man’s Thomas the Tank Engine IMHO – railway yard politics and over-simplistic moral parables about hard work, effort and reward and community tensions. Bagpuss on the other hand was rich in the kind of whimsy, original ideas and fertile symbolism that characterise the greatest fiction. No finer preparation for the open-minded, imagination-led life.

Pretentious, moi?

“A friend of mine,
A porcupine,
Went up in a balloon.
He sailed it here,
He sailed it there,
He sailed it almost everywhere,
Except, perhaps, the moon.”

By: Edis

Edis — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:16:02 +0000

May be biased by the Welsh element – my favourite episode is where Ivor sings ‘hen wlad fy nhadau’

By: Jonathan Calder

Jonathan Calder — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:02:41 +0000

Don’t blame me: I voted for Noggin the Nog.

By: Stephen Glenn

Stephen Glenn — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:51:55 +0000

I think that is why I started my whole tribute to Oliver on the way into the station.

Not only was it easier to offload the other characters from Ivor’s carriages, but although I did go home that day to get a yawn from my bedside Bagpuss, it was Ivor that seemed to have the biggest impact on me to for some reason.