CLUNES: RIP Oliver Postgate 1925

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

RIP Oliver Postgate 1925 - 2008

"There is no such thing as 'the children of today'. Children are not 'of today'. They come afresh into this world in a steady stream and, apart from a few in-built instincts, they are blank pages happily waiting to be written on."
- Oliver Postgate

Clangers final episode, "Music of the Spheres"

Links:
Obligatory Wikipedia entry
Obituary on the Guardian website
Postgate's personal website (with essays)
Postgate's New Statesman columns

1 comment:

Phillip Edward Johnson15 December 2008 at 08:04
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=50-w_Nggq3E
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IN THE BEGINNING...

Somewhere, very far away and very hard to find, there is a planet: Clunes.

Clunes is a beautiful yet turbulent planet. Populated by organisms (Clunes) who live for exactly one day, the life cycle of this globe is inextricably linked with that of its inhabitants. Each day the Clunes wake, work, relax, procreate and then, shortly after nightfall, they die, wiped out in a catastrophic global war. Theirs is a life of infinite chaos, born from their earth to survive only for a fleeting cosmological second, doomed to repeat the pattern into the forever, returning to their earth and repeating, repeating...

The fallout from this intense daily activity echoes through space as waves of vibrational energy or 'radiation' which - until recently - was only detectable by extremely sensitive computerized telescopes. 4 years ago two human beings from Earth - Tom Scott and Dan Bolger - let it be known to the international space community that they can not only sense this radiation but can also interpret it through improvised music. Although they presented their findings to NASA, they received no word back from the Americans. Similar enquiries with the Russians, the Europeans, the Australians, the Indians and the North Koreans yielded no contact, no word. It was as if the whole space community regarded them as joke, a crank, and not worth wasting time with.

It was in 2007 when the pair received communication from the Clunes Corporation, who - unbeknownst to the wider public - had been quietly and diligently researching signals from the planet Clunes since the early 1960s. This band of discredited and disillusioned scientists dropped out of the astronomy 'circuit' (lavish banquets, meetings with world leaders, conferences at Marriot hotels) in favour of a spartan existence stationed in Antarctica, some way off the South Pole.

They invited the "Clunes" to their own annual conference held in this grubby Antarctic Research Centre, where they delivered their findings to a rapt audience of rogue space scientists. Since this momentous meeting, they have established research centres in two locations in the UK, helping co-ordinate international field studies, monitoring general space research and educating the wider populace about this extraordinary planet.

United by this shared goal, the Clunes Corporation and "The Clunes" themselves have since dedicated their lives to translating and sharing the lifes and deaths of this faraway earth, in the hope that one day humanity as a whole will be able, somehow, to make sense of it all.

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

RIP Oliver Postgate 1925 - 2008

1 comment:

IN THE BEGINNING...

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