‘They were a bit abrasive’: how kids’ TV Clangers secretly swore

The son of Oliver Postgate, creator of the 1970s show, reveals what was in the scripts for the delightful and puzzling swannee-whistle creatures

When Oliver Postgate, the late maestro of children's television programmes, first invited young viewers to travel with him in our imaginations across the vast starry stretches of outer space", he was introducing many of them to a lifeform they would never forget: the Clanger.

These little pink, knitted, nozzle-nosed aliens, Postgate suggested, were really rather like us, living out their lives on the small planet wrapped in clouds" they called home. Now it has emerged they were much more like us than we thought.