Bagpuss
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40 free Bagpuss trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Bagpuss ran for a single short series in 1974, yet few British children's programmes are remembered with more affection. Emily's saggy pink cat, the pompous Professor Yaffle, Madeleine, Gabriel and the busy mice have been waking up for new generations ever since. This quiz covers the whole world of the series: the characters and how they were made, the lost things Emily brings home and the stories told about them, the songs, the two friends who created it all on a farm in Kent, and the afterlife of the cat himself. It suits anyone who grew up with the programme, parents sharing it with their own children, and quiz setters after a nostalgic round on classic British television.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bagpuss was dyed pink by mistake; which colour did Peter Firmin intend the cloth cat to be?
Ginger
Ginger was the plan: a dyeing firm in Folkestone got the cloth wrong and it came back pink and cream. Peter Firmin later called the error the best thing that ever happened.
Q 02In Bagpuss, the mice claim their toy mill turns breadcrumbs and butterbeans into which treat?
Chocolate biscuits
Chocolate biscuits roll out of the mill, but it is a trick. Professor Yaffle looks round the back and finds the mice wheeling the same ones through again and again.
Q 03Which band's 2003 single There There takes its subtitle from a song in the children's series Bagpuss?
Radiohead
Radiohead's Thom Yorke even asked Oliver Postgate to make the video for the single. Postgate, by then retired, turned the job down.
Q 04Professor Yaffle, the dry academic of Bagpuss, is said to have been modelled on which philosopher?
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell, winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the model usually named for the fact-loving bookend who is forever finding fault with the mice.
Q 05Peter Firmin, who built the puppets for Bagpuss, also designed which glove puppet known for a posh voice?
Basil Brush
Basil Brush takes his surname from the real fox tail Firmin used for the first puppet in 1962. Brush is the traditional name for a fox's tail.
Q 06Oliver Postgate, the writer and narrator of Bagpuss, was a cousin of which British-born Hollywood actress?
Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury, later famous as the sleuth Jessica Fletcher, was his cousin through his mother Daisy, a daughter of the Labour leader George Lansbury.
Q 07Bagpuss topped a 1999 BBC poll of favourite children's shows despite having how many episodes?
13
13 episodes were all that was ever made, first shown in 1974. Repeats kept the old cloth cat on British screens for more than a decade afterwards.
Q 08In Bagpuss, the pompous Professor Yaffle is a carved bookend in the shape of which bird?
Woodpecker
Woodpecker is hidden in his name: yaffle is another name for the European green woodpecker, the bird the character was loosely based on.
Q 09Which animal is Gabriel, the singer who performs with Madeleine in Bagpuss from on top of a can?
Toad
Toad is right, and a real one inspired him: it lived in the basement of the flat that Peter and Joan Firmin once rented in Twickenham, beside the Thames.
Q 10In 2014, Bagpuss featured in a set of twelve of which items honouring classic children's television?
Postage stamps
Postage stamps issued by Royal Mail in January 2014 put the pink cat among a dozen favourites from British children's television.
Q 11In Bagpuss, which kind of toy is Madeleine, who sits in a wicker chair and helps tell the stories?
Rag doll
Rag doll Madeleine was made by Joan Firmin, Peter Firmin's wife, who sewed a new version for the series when Oliver Postgate asked for her as a character.
Q 12In Bagpuss, Emily takes the lost things she finds to which kind of place, where nothing is ever sold?
A shop
A shop, though an odd one: Emily has each find mended and put in the window so that whoever lost it can come in and claim it.
Q 13What does Bagpuss do at the end of every episode that turns all his toy friends back into ornaments?
Falls asleep
Falls asleep is the rule of the magic: the toys only come alive while the cat is awake, so one big yawn turns Madeleine and Gabriel back into ordinary dolls.
Q 21Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin made Bagpuss through which two-man production company?
Smallfilms
Smallfilms could turn out two minutes of finished film a day, far more than a conventional animation studio, with Postgate moving every figure himself.
Q 22Gabriel in Bagpuss was worked live through a hole in his can, while the other toys used which technique?
Stop-motion
Stop-motion would have made his singing scenes painfully slow to film, so Peter Firmin built a mechanism to work him in real time.
Q 23Why did the BBC reject Professor Bogwood, a man in a top hat first planned as the scholar of Bagpuss?
Too frightening
Q 14Emily, the girl who wakes Bagpuss with a rhyme, is dressed and presented as a child of which era?
Victorian
Victorian Emily was played by Emily Firmin, the young daughter of the show's co-creator Peter Firmin, and the scene is set around the turn of the 20th century.
Q 15Which instrument does Gabriel play to accompany the songs and stories in the children's series Bagpuss?
Banjo
Banjo is his instrument, and Gabriel strums it for songs such as The Bony King of Nowhere, about a king in need of a cushion.
Q 16Which other series by the makers of Bagpuss features pink whistling creatures and a Soup Dragon?
Clangers
Clangers arrived in 1969 after the BBC asked for a colour series, and with space exploration in the news Oliver Postgate decided to set it on a small planet.
Q 17Each episode of Bagpuss opens with still photographs of Emily shown in which old-fashioned tone?
Sepia
Sepia gives way to full colour the moment the cat wakes. One of the opening pictures is a real 1898 view of the village of Horrabridge in Devon.
Q 18Gabriel in Bagpuss was named after Walter Gabriel, a character in which long-running British radio soap?
The Archers
The Archers has been on air since 1951 and is the world's longest-running drama. The puppet himself was first made for Peter Firmin's earlier show The Musical Box.
Q 19In the Bagpuss episode The Fiddle, Gabriel says the music comes from which creature of Irish legend?
Leprechaun
Leprechaun is Gabriel's guess, but when the mice tip over the smoking bucket they find only a tiny fiddle, which then seems to play Charlie Mouse rather than the other way round.
Q 20The makers of Bagpuss started out in 1959 with which series about a Welsh steam locomotive?
Ivor the Engine
Ivor the Engine longs to sing in a choir. Oliver Postgate was inspired by a Welsh railwayman who told him how steam locomotives seemed to come alive each morning.
Too frightening was the verdict on the figure carved from black Irish bog-wood. The BBC asked for a non-human instead, which is how a bird got the job.
Q 24The mice of Bagpuss are carvings on the side of which mechanical instrument?
Organ
Organ is right: the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ plays rolls of music and projects pictures onto a screen, and its six mice sing as they work.
Q 25Why was Oliver Postgate, later the creator of Bagpuss, sent to prison during the Second World War?
Refusing army service
Refusing army service as a conscientious objector, as his father had in the First World War, he later worked on farms and then for the Red Cross in occupied Germany.
Q 26In the first episode of Bagpuss, the splinters of wood that Emily finds turn out to be which object?
A ship in a bottle
A ship in a bottle is Professor Yaffle's verdict, and the model is magically rebuilt with the help of a nursery rhyme and a poem about mermaids.
Q 27The mice in Bagpuss climb into an old ballet shoe and use feathers to pretend it is what?
A rowing boat
A rowing boat is Charlie Mouse's idea, with feathers for oars. The mice later mend the shoe until it is fit for a prima ballerina.
Q 28The original Bagpuss went on show at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, a museum in which English city?
Canterbury
Canterbury lies close to the farm at Blean where the series was filmed, and in 2011 the city gave Peter Firmin its freedom in recognition of his work.
Q 29Which Viking-age saga by the makers of Bagpuss has characters inspired by the Lewis chessmen?
Noggin the Nog
Noggin the Nog is said to owe his name to Neasden: Peter Firmin saw the station sign on the London Underground and it made him think of the word.
Q 30The makers of Bagpuss set up their film studio on a farm in which kind of disused building?
Cowshed
Cowshed turned film studio, it stood at Peter Firmin's home in Blean and was later replaced by a row of converted pigsties.