It's been a good week for ...

children's TV

They were pink and mousey and lived on a little blue planet. Wise beyond their whistley language, they appreciated the restorative powers of homemade soup. Now, The Clangers are making a comeback.

The original show, created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, first aired in 1969 on BBC One, and featured extraterrestrial creatures who lived on a far-away planet in craters covered by dustbin lids, the noisy clang of which gave the show its name. It became a children's classic and confirmed that 1969 was a momentous year in space.

The new version of the series is to be narrated by presenter Michael Palin, who perhaps thought he'd already visited the most amazing and far-flung places in the universe.

The original show was filmed in stop-motion animation with props that you might find in your local charity shop. The new production is costing £5 million, which buys a lot of dustbin lids.

I hope The Clangers don't lose their charm for a new generation of children, although I suspect the merchandising moguls already have Clangers in the pipeline for Christmas.

Which reminds me of a fellow childhood Clangers fan, whose excitement knew no bounds when her granny promised to knit her a Clanger for her birthday. The anticipation was electric and the envy among her friends intense.

Sadly, her granny had only seen the show on a black-and-white telly, so the lovingly knitted creature was grey.

But I'm sure she remembers it with rose-tinted spectacles.

It's been a bad week for ... dead pets

Though it's always sad when a pet dies, conventional wisdom suggests that it gives children an important taster of the more challenging aspects of life.

But Dutch schoolboy Pepeijn Bruins refused to face up to the loss of his pet rat. Following the death of Ratjetoe (Dutch for ratatouille) he had the dearly beloved animal stuffed. He then went a step further, calling in inventors to attach propellers to the taxidermied rat.

Ratjetoe is now a remote-controlled rat-copter, video footage of which is freaky to say the least.

Pepeijn's parents really should have told him that when a pet goes to the big garden in the sky, it doesn't have to fly there.