Peter Firmin

Today, December 11th 2025 would have been the 97th birthday of artist and puppet maker, Peter Firmin.

Firmin, along with his friend, Oliver Postgate, composers and musicians like Vernon Elliott, Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner and various family members created some of the most enduring and endearing childrens televison programmes from a cowshed at Firmin's home.  Firmin and Postgate through their production company Smallfilms created shows like Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, Pogles' Wood, Clangers & Bagpuss, shows that remained embedded in the popular imagination - entire generations can still imitate the Clanger's swanee whistle speech, Bagpuss' yawn or the sound of Ivor's engine.

Peter Firmin sadly passed in 2018 - Oliver Postage, a decade before in 2008 - but their creations live on.  The video below documents Firmin's receipt of the BAFTA Children's Special Award 2014 and includes a lovely little behind the scenes film of both creators as well as Firmin's speech - where we get to find out how much his daughter Emily was paid for her appearence in Bagpuss.

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

NEWS: Sarob Press publish 'Votive Offerings'

Coming in January from Sarob Press is a new 4 author collection called 'Votive Offerings'

From the mail out...

Four ‘all new’ long stories (or novelettes) imbued with the mystery and otherworldliness of place and of landscape – strange, secret, mystical and ancient.

In “Roman Masks” by Mark Valentine art college teachers and their students in north west England invoke, through strange ritual, ancient gods and terrible dark forces at a coastal temple ruin.

John Howard’s weirdly enigmatic “Desire Path” takes the unwary reader along pathways long forgotten and thought lost ~ but what if you could walk along ways that no longer exist?

“Figures in a Landscape” by Peter Bell finds its heroine seeking a lost (or possibly mythic) Welsh hill figure and discovering the seemingly harmless to be anything but.

Colin Insole’s “The April Rainers” is a tale of the re-emergence of something old, powerful and malevolent, and the story of the centuries-old fellowship pledged to protect the land and keep it safe from the terror.

Published as a limited edition hardback.

Info on how to order can be found here...

https://sarobpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/new-title-news-votive-offerings.html?m=1

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

The Return

In 1973, a year after his curiosity was warned as 'Mr Paxton', Peter Vaughan had another ghostly encounter as 'Steven Royds' in this lovely little spooky two-hander based on stories by A.M. Burrage (Nobody's House) and Ambrose Bierce (The Middle Toe of the Right Foot).

Royds arrives at the Harboys house late one night and begs admittance from the housekeeper, Mrs Park (Rosalie Crutchley - The Haunting), claiming he's there to tour the house with a view to buying.  Having some knowledge of the events that had left to house empty for the previous two decades he subsequently demands to spend the night in the haunted master bedroom.

This lovely little gothic, haunted house short film is very much in the classic Ghost Story for Christmas tradition.  It looks stunning, sounds great and is beautifully performed by Vaughan and Crutchley and is deserving of a much greater audience.

 

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

NEWS: Tartarus Press publish Mark Valentine's 'The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things'

Originally published in 2018, by Zagava 'The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things' is a collection of short stories by Wyrd Britain favourite, Mark Valentine. On December 1st, Tartarus Press are re-publishing this long out of print collection with the addition of nine stories or vignettes written at the same time but omitting the selection of journal entries.

From the Tartarus Press release notes...

All the stories were originally selected for anthologies or journals. ‘Vain Shadows Flee’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2016 edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing), and ‘Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore’ was translated into Spanish by María Pilar San Roman in an award-winning anthology.

And from Mark's post on his Wormwoodiana blog...

The artwork depicts the mysterious Three Headed King motif from the ancient church at Sancreed in the far west of Cornwall, which appears in the title story. Other stories are about the ancient mysteries of Palmyra and Jerusalem, the music of Stonehenge and of the fabulously rare record Goat Songs, the uncanny in performances of Milton’s Comus and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and the wondrous influences of a toy cockatrice.

I was privileged to receive a copy of the original edition about which I wrote that this book finds Mark "exploring ephemeral landscapes of the unknowable and the inimitable.  He tells stories of the borderlands, of the thin places where glimpses are caught of the otherwheres, where the truly (un)lucky get to tread on soil unused to human feet.  Stories of those liminal places where a travellers only map would be the tales told of them."

And, that he takes us on, "journeys both sinister and beautiful (often simultaneously) to places terrifying and beguiling (often simultaneously) in the company of the lost, the curious, the brave and the foolish and in each we can see ourselves as they react to the outrageous in deeply human ways."

This new edition of 'The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things' is available as a 350 copy limited edition hardback and is sure to sell out fast.  Order now at...

http://tartaruspress.com/valentine-uncertainty.html

..........................................................................................

If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.