How the late John Cunliffe created Postman Pat

Author offered harmonious vision of British countryside based on the rolling hills and winding brooks around Kendal

John Cunliffe, the creator of Postman Pat and Rosie and Jim, has died aged 85.

The beloved children’s writer spent much of his life in Kendal, Westmoreland, whose dry stone wall lanes, rolling hills, winding brooks and quaint slate villages provided the inspiration for Greendale where Pat completed his rounds.

The series was directed and animated in stop-motion by Ivor Wood, also responsible for The Magic Roundabout, The Wombles and Paddington. It was first broadcast by the BBC on 16 September 1981, running for 196 episodes through the 1980s and 1990s.

Following a hiatus, Postman Pat was revived in 2003 before a film followed in 2014, with Stephen Mangan replacing Ken Barrie as the voice of Pat.

Reflecting on Pat’s creation in 2011, Cunliffe remembered approaching the BBC with a collection of farmer characters. When these were rejected, he was forced to return to the drawing board.

“Who else lives in the countryside?” he asked himself. “Well, a postman travels around, he meets a lot of people, so it won’t be static, there’ll be all that movement and getting to know people and a friendly character.”

Encouraged to pursue the thread, he was sent back to Kendal to write an outline for 13 episodes.

“When I wrote it, I didn’t know it was going to be animated. They said: ‘Just write stories. Don’t worry how we’re doing it. You just write stories.’ So I did.”

(BBC)

“The important thing, I think the editor at my publishers said, is that for once they’ve asked a writer to write a series and they haven’t interfered because they produced it exactly as I wrote it.”

Cunliffe had been a mobile librarian in Northumberland at an earlier stage of his life and drew on those experiences of driving from village to village for his cast of characters, from Mrs Goggins to Ted Glen and the Reverend Timms.

“I travelled around very much as Pat travels around... a lot of that fed into it,” he said.

Born in Colne, Lincolnshire, Cunliffe had been bullied at school by older boys so wanted to offer a comforting, harmonious vision of the world through his idyllic depiction of Greendale, specifically based on the valley of Longsleddale.

Jess the black and white cat, meanwhile, “provided Pat with someone to speak to without seeming too peculiar”.

Cunliffe did, however, become exasperated with the commercialisation of Pat, feeling the merchandising had become excessive and often shoddy.

In response, he created Rosie and Jim for CITV, over which he retained total control.

The adventures of a pair of living ragdolls meandering through the canals of the British countryside by narrowboat, the programme featured Cunliffe himself as the Dickensianly-named boat owner Fizzgog, who would write stories about Rosie and Jim and often speak directly to camera.

His local paper, the Ilkey Gazette, paid moving tribute to the late author and poet in its obituary this week: “John Cunliffe left his Ilkley home in a deluge of rain on 20 September, never to return. Even the skies wept for John.”