Bagpuss Featured Episode: Ship In a Bottle
In looking back over the fourteen-and-a-half minutes of this first episode, it's important to note that the first three are the standard opening sequence. That's over a fifth of the episode before we even get to the unique story, though they're superbly charming as always.
When we get into that story, it opens with some amusing sadism as the mice try and push Charlie Mouse head first into a bottle. Pretty soon things are broken up by the matriarchal figure of Madeline, a strict adjunct to Bagpuss's village idiot persona and Yaffle's wafer-thin pomposity.
After an ever-delightful mouse song, Gabriel the toad takes us on another musical odyssey and I think I've finally hit on why I don't like him: many of his movements, particularly when playing guitar, appear to be live puppetry. It's the mixed signals your brain is sending to you... the rest of the characters move in slow, disjointed, stop-and-start stop motion photography. Suddenly throughout this haze a character begins to move rapidly in real time, speaking with a masculine voice in strict counterpoint to the fey tones of the others. Basically, it's unnerving. Really Madeline and Gabriel aren't bad characters as such, but Yaffle-The Mice-Bagpuss are such a comic tour-de-force that any interruption from their antics is never welcome. Though surely that Toby Jug thing that sits on the higher shelf (pictured below) would be more fun if it came to life?
Eight minutes in and the two finally stop singing their folk songs and Bagpuss gets to tell a story... a story about the time he entered a ship's bar and had an underage topless girl sitting on his lap. It was clearly a more innocent time. Bagpuss's story � which eventually involves five topless mermaids � has magic properties that put the ship back together again. That's yer lot.
"Baggy, and a bit loose at the seams. But Emily loved him." And there's not a dry eye in the house.
