Featured site: The Clangers

Hear Tiny Clanger!

Here is the Soup Dragon from your favorite 1960's children's program!  You can even hear him here!

Taken from this most excellent site:

On discussing the rumor that Clangers swore a lot - bearing in mind that Clangers don't speak English, they whistle.  This hilarious text (below) was describing a BBC script review early on in their careers:

"I should explain that the Clangers’ conversation had presented a technical problem, They spoke a language of very articulate whistling squeak, which needed to be translated from its natural medium of nuclear magnetic resonance (there being no air to carry sound) into audible terms. The nearest I could get to that was to write out the script in full and then persuade Stephen Sylvester to help me record the dialogue, just as we had done for the Pogle films, by reading it, or rather playing the inflections of it, on a selection of Swannee whistles. In this way I was hoping to make a sort of wild-life film in which, by listening carefully, the viewer would be able to understand what was being said and work out what was going on,

Rather nervously I asked Ursula Eason of the BBC what they objected to in the scripts. She replied: "The bad language."

I could only think of one piece of bad language. One of the episodes begins with Major Clanger trying to open the big sliding doors of the main cave mouth. It jams and his first line is:

• "Oh sod it! The bloody thing’s stuck again!"
• "That’s it." said Ursula. "You know quite well we can’t say things like that on childrens’ programmes."
• "But .. " I said, "they don’t say it. They whistle it."
• "But surely people will know?"
• "If they have nice minds they will hear him say ’Oh dear me. The naughty thing is jammed again.’"
• "Oh, all right then, I suppose so, but please keep the language moderate." "

Copyright © 1996,1997 Smallfilms / John Sykes Fletcher