Smallfilms is a British television production company that made animated TV programmes for children from 1959 until the 1980s. In 2014 the company began operating again, producing a new series of its most famous show, The Clangers, but it became dormant again in 2017, after production of the show was slightly changed. It was originally a partnership between Oliver Postgate (who wrote the scripts, animated the characters, and voiced many of the characters) and Peter Firmin (who made the models of the characters and drew the artwork). Several popular series of short films were made using stop-motion animation, including Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine. Another Smallfilms production, Bagpuss, came top of a BBC poll to find the favourite British children's programme of the 20th century. Background In 1957, Postgate was appointed a stage manager with Associated-Rediffusion, the company that then held the commercial weekday television franchise for London. Attached to the children's programming section, he thought he could do better with the relatively low budgets of the then black and white television productions. He wrote Alexander the Mouse, a story about a mouse born to be king. Using an Irish-produced magnetic system - on which animated characters were magnetically attached to a painted background, then filmed using a 45 degree mirror - he persuaded Peter Firmin, who was then teaching at the Central School of Art, to create the painted backgrounds. Postgate later recalled that they broadcast around 26 of these programmes live-to-air, a task made harder by the production problems encountered by the use and restrictions of using magnets. After the relative success of Alexander the Mouse, Postgate agreed a deal to make his next series on film, for a budget of £175 per programme (a minuscule amount even at that time). Making a stop motion animation table in his bedroom, he wrote the Chinese serial The Journey of Master Ho: a formal Chinese epic, about a small boy and a water-buffalo. This was intended for deaf children, a distinct advantage in that the production required no soundtrack, which reduced production costs. He engaged a painter to produce the backgrounds, but as the painter was classically Chinese-trained he produced them in three-quarter view, rather than in the conventional Egyptian full-view manner needed for flat animation under a camera. This resulted in Firmin's characters looking as if they were short in one leg, but the success of