too bad we never got Bagpuss over here

"...the lesser-known BAGPUSS was the epic masterpiece of this formidable canon which, like Fawlty Towers, you are always shocked to be reminded ran for a mere 13 episodes. The plot was laid out in a title sequence of faded sepia prints, a two-minute effort shown at the beginning of each episode - a fact that may surprise many Teletubbies-bashers today. In full, then - Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a little girl called Emily. Emily had a shop. It was quite an unusual shop, because it didn't sell anything. Everything in the window was something somebody had once lost, but Emily had found, and taken home to Bagpuss. The titular old fat furry catpuss (widely rumoured to be baggy, and a bit loose at the seams) was called upon by Emily, in cod shamanic prose, to 'wake up and look at this thing that I bring. Wake up, be bright, be golden and light. Bagpuss, O hear what I sing.' Thus summoned, the cat yawned and woke up. And, of course, when Bagpuss woke up, all his friends woke up to. The mice on the mouse-organ woke up and stretched. A toad with a banjo (Gabriel - 'Oh, look!'), and a rather limply-written female character, Madeleine, also woke up. But the best was the allegedly JAMES BURKE (cf CONNECTIONS)-inspired PROFESSOR YAFFLE, a 'carved wooden book-end in the shape of a woodpecker' who made hard work of ambling down a pile of books to examine whatever this week's object was, and draw inevitably wrong conclusions. Hence a porcupine pin-cushion was claimed to be an earless elephant, and (by a thinking-cap-aided Bagpuss) a 'small, soft, Hamish.' Quite. A bog-standard doll's house was turned by the mice into a mill for making chocolate biscuits out of breadcrumbs and butterbeans, only to be exposed as a fraud. These intellectual battles were interspersed with songs and paper animation..."