The last series from Oliver Postgate's Smallfilms and, today, the most popular (well, Clangers comes close). Each episode begins with a montage of Edwardian-flavoured sepia photgraphs that explain the rather bizarre premise. A little girl named Emily (who never appears in the actual series) owns a shop that doesn't sell anything; rather, it acts as some kind of lost-and-found department. Inhabiting the shop are Bagpuss ("the most beautiful, most important, most magical saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world"), a miniature organ covered with model mice, a ragdoll named Madeline, a woodpecker bookend named Professor Yaffle and a toy banjo-playing toad named Gabriel. In each episode, Emily brings something new into the shop; Bagpuss and his friends then come to life to figure out what it is and perform any necessary repairs.

It's done chiefly with stop-motion, but other styles of animation are used at points in the series. One character, Gabriel the Toad, is actually depicted using a live-action puppet during close-ups, and when a character tells a story about the latest object, the show cuts to the style of cutout animation used in Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. Other stories are told by a small television screen on the mouse organ; these are presentented with folk music and camera pans around still images.

The stories, by the way, are just weird. A particularly bizarre episode, titled The Hamish, revolves around something resembling a stuffed tartan mole. Bagpuss tells the others that it is a hamish, a Scottish creature that makes a noise sounding like badly-played bagpipes.

He then goes on to explain how the hamishes got their name. A cutout animated sequence tells the story of a hamish (before it was called a hamish) who hears a noise and, thinking it to be another hamish, follows it; however, he finds that it's Travis McTravis playing the bagpipes badly. At first, Travis mistakes the creature for his lost brother Hamish, and the rest is history. Choking up, Bagpuss describes how Travis later went to live with his sister-in-law, who refused to let him play the bagpipes.

Bagpuss has a simple premise, but one that taps into not only the spirit behind children playing with toys, but the curiousity that lies behind mankind's mythology and folktales. The stories told by the characters alone make for an intriguing set of modern fairytales.