Bagpuss Quotes

My mate Karl once told me he’d been looking after this five-year-old boy who – not knowing enough to have an ironic inflection to his words – said, ‘I want something.’ He didn’t know what it was. Not ‘I want sweets’, or ‘a can of Coke’, or ‘to watch the Tweenies’, or whatever it is they’re into now (I like Bagpuss), but ‘I want something.’ All of us, I think, have that feeling. And what heroin does when you first start taking it is tell you what that something is.

Society doesn’t function well unless we have shared references. When turning up at a new job, university or party, we all rely on mentioning TV characters like Spock, Bagpuss or Hitler in the confidence that others will know what we’re talking about.

Society doesn’t function well unless we have shared references. When turning up at a new job, university or party, we all rely on mentioning TV characters like Spock, Bagpuss or Hitler in the confidence that others will know what we’re talking about. In the last 50 years, television has supplanted history, culture and mythology as what we have in common.