Alpha Mummy: There should be a day of national mourning for Postgate

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Before my brothers had children of their own, one of them would be co-opted as Duty Uncle on Christmas Day, so that we could get lunch ready while he amused the children. Our son was 4 when he pronounced, one Christmas morning after an exhilaratingly failed session with a balloon-rocket: “I like Uncle Mike the best because he is the most silly uncle”.

There was a profound truth in that, although for the sake of family harmony I should stress that Mike has always had hot competition in that area, and that when not in the company of under-fives all three brothers are sober citizens. But the fact is that all children have a strong urge towards nonsense, silliness, absurdity. And for all our desire to offer them educational or reassuring stories, they will always have an eye for goonery and an ear for silly rhymes.

I thought of this yesterday morning as the nation mourned Oliver Postgate, creator of such benign absurdities as Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss, Noggin the Nog and The Clangers.

Grown-ups like to present children with stories about being brave and sensible, or loaded with facts about the wide world. There is a place for this, whether in the old world of Arthur Mee's Encyclopaedia and The Railway Children or the modern equivalents of educational DVDs and books about children in tower blocks coming to terms with divorce and knife gangs.

But they need nonsense too. We all do. As soon as a baby can focus, it longs for jokes. Silly jokes. You can make a two-month- old grin and giggle by putting a wastepaper basket over your head and taking it off again: I demonstrated this once to a scornful academic who had been claiming that babies could not perceive incongruity because their range of experience was too short. His baby thought differently.

As a child grows it learns plenty of serious stuff - like language and how to use the potty - and immediately subverts it with daft rhymes, shouting “smelly jelly fatty belly”. Any character calling himself Noggin the Nog or Bagpuss is halfway there already; and silly noises are gratefully received, so Postgate's Clangers with their mad slide-whistling were ideal. This does not indicate shallowness of understanding - the same child who learns keenly about steam engines and pistons can be charmed by Ivor the Engine's ambition to sing in a choir.

Nonsense, at its best, takes us into the realm of the impossible, and when your world is circumscribed by your size and strength and by living under authority (we can all feel that way, even as adults), nonsense is a blessed relief. It is an adventure, a romance, an escape. The horrors of the plague can become a ring o'roses, the fear of Napoleon a game (taught to my children by an old Suffolk lady) of Chasing Bony Party.

So prosy old Postman Pat is all very well, and so is the tediously responsible Thomas the Tank Engine (Fat Controller's pet that he is, always saving the day). But there are moments when you need something sillier. You need Oliver Postgate's Clangers eating some blue string pudding and green soup. Or a verse or two of Jabberwocky, a dose of Edward Lear, or Bill and Ben saying nothing more taxing than “flubalub”. Or the Christopher Isherwood poem that starts: “The common cormorant or shag/ lays eggs inside a paper bag...”

And the more serious-minded and curriculum-conscious the adults around you, the more you need nonsense. It is particularly galling when they cheat by trying to sneak lessons into everything: I had high hopes of the Teletubbies, rolling around in coloured fat-suits and squeaking “eh-oh!” at each other on green mounds. But just as this psychedelic landscape became engagingly mad, one of them would stare at its telly-belly and give birth to an educational little film about canals, or baking a cake. Pshaw!

There is a long and lovely tradition of nonsense literature in English, and we would do well to remember and respect it rather than grey everything down into social realism, Barbie-fied celebrity or factual automatism. Dulling rationalism threatens at all levels: even James Bond has lost his edge of fantastico-technical nonsense (gondolas on wheels! cars with fish fins!) and turned, with the arrival of Daniel Craig, into a dour, sub-le Carré chronicle of tediously wicked villains and an angsty 007 who never cracks a smile.

The nonsense tradition must go on: it embraces everything from Anglo-Saxon riddles to T.S. Eliot's Jellicle cats dancing under a Jellicle moon, to The Goon Show and the various heirs of Monty Python. It is always best marked by a certain amorality, as in Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter, in which the neat little oysters are eventually eaten.

Even the most kindly child likes that: in the realm of nonsense there is little morality. Perhaps that is why it provides such needful, happy release to those who worry a lot about right and wrong - such as dutiful children or, indeed, our own Prince of Wales. Why else, do you think, does the heir to the throne - who literally worries for England - find such lifelong joy in the adventures of Bluebottle, Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty in The Goon Show? Why else, indeed, did those troubled men Sellers and Milligan invent it all in the first place? Not to push back the boundaries of art but to create a parallel universe where nothing is wrong and everything is daft. And why, one might equally ask, was John Cleese only ever funny in the days before he went to see a series of shrinks, worked out all his issues and lost the gift of nonsense?

You can divide nonsense into two streams, though. There is full-on nonsense, detached from reality and floating free, far above us on pink-and-magenta-striped clouds, up there in the sky with Lucy and her diamonds. And then there is what I would call anti-sense. Lewis Carroll is the best example of the latter: he was a logician and his world is a looking-glass with everything backwards and therefore absurd, but mostly with clear references to reality: the Duchess's baby may well be a pig, but she is a recognisable, satirised character; Alice herself is grounded, always able to say “You're nothing but a pack of playing-cards!” or help the dormouse out of the teapot. Many of his best-loved poems are satires on the improving literature of the day - How Doth the Little Crocodile is a straight adaptation of an Isaac Watts verse. Yet sometimes Carroll can fly beyond the tugging threads of leftover 18th-century Oxford rationalism that still held him captive: The Hunting of the Snark is the most powerfully surreal and therefore beautiful of his works, the Snark itself a “Boojum”, which is to say, nothing. And the crew's behaviour is satisfyingly mad:

They roused him with muffins, they roused him with ice

They roused him with mustard-and-cress;

They roused him with jam and judicious advice,

They set him conundrums to guess...

Here he moves closer to Lear, though nobody before or since has matched Lear's gentle, romantic blurred vision. I have met at least one teacher who won't use his verse on the ground that it is wrong to let children think there is any such thing as a Pobble, or that there is any help in Aunt Jobiska's remedy of “lavender water tinged with pink”. I excoriate that teacher and all her dreary works! Nonsense it all may be, but I learnt much of what I know - really know - about life and love from Lear's poems: yearningly romantic, a Platonic ideal of a world where Owl and Pussycat may sink their natural differences, fall in love to the sound of a small guitar and buy a pig's nose-ring for a shilling. Every enterprise of my life has been fortified by the spirit of the Jumblies, who quixotically defied sense and prudence to follow their dream:

They went to sea in a sieve, they did;

In a sieve they went to sea;

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,

In a sieve they went to sea!

They faced storms with pink blotting paper and a coppery gong, and knew themselves to be wise:

Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,

Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong...

O Timballo! How happy we are

When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar!

Well, as Lear himself says with that melancholy inseparable from true romanticism, far and few are the lands where the Jumblies live. But when their message crackles through to us via Postgate or Carroll, Eliot or Milligan, we should rejoice. Recession is coming. Sail in a sieve, take plenty of honey, rely on your Aunt Jobiska and listen for the distant singing of Ivor the Engine in the heavenly choir. A little insanity keeps you sane.

Absurdities we have loved

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

The Owl And The Pussycat (1871)

Edward Lear's best-known poem, The Owl and the Pussycat centres on the love affair between the two title characters, who are married by a turkey in the final stanza. In this work, Lear coined the nonsense word “runcible spoon”. No specific definition of runcible has ever been found; Lear celebrated words primarily for their sounds.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

Jabberwocky (1871)

Lewis Carroll's verse first appeared in his novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Jabberwocky features the first use of a portmanteau - a word blending the sounds and meanings of two words - as in “slithy”, meaning lithe and slimy, and “mimsy”, meaning flimsy and miserable. Another well-loved nonsense poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, appeared in the same novel.

Ben: Flobadob, Ickle Weed.

Weed: Weeeeeeeeeeed.

Flowerpot Men (1952-70)

With a talking plant and a language called oddle poddle, it was never made clear what exactly Bill and Ben were growing in their flowerpots. Nevertheless, the Watch With Mother stars soon became firm favourites, with their various capers with mud pies and paint pots. Their gobbledegook dialect prompted some parents to complain that the programme would impair children's language development, a charge laid against Teletubbies 40 years later.

The Chief Defect of Henry King

Was chewing little bits of String.

At last he swallowed some which tied

Itself in ugly Knots inside.

Cautionary Tales for Children (1907)

Hilaire Belloc's verses were not in themselves nonsensical but rather highlighted human absurdity, winning a following that included the likes of Roald Dahl and the Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett. Belloc's book warned youngsters of the perils of chewing string, slamming doors and playing with balloons.

Dylan's belt: “I'm fed up with holding up your trousers.

You're always asleep - I never get out.”

The Magic Roundabout (1965-77)

First created in France in 1963, Dougal, Zebedee and Florence won over adults and children alike with their dry humour, brightly coloured carousel and surreal organ theme tune. Millions of fans tuned in to catch the five-minute show before the news, regularly rounded off by bouncing jack-in-the-box Zebedee announcing that it was “time for bed”.

CHLOE LAMBERT

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