Postman Pat has played a formative role in my childhood, but an ambivalent one at best. For those who had no exposure to the world of this happy postman, his cat, and the red Royal Post van that he drives through a sleepy country village, this posting will mean little to you.
I am, you see, haunted by Postman Pat and to this day, or rather, at least until the day before yesterday, Pat and his sleepy village have appeared randomly in my worst nightmares…
To be honest, I don’t really know why this seemingly harmless and altruistic character plagues me. He doesn’t appear in some horrifying Robbo Pat form, armed to the teeth. Perhaps I’ll never know what traumatized me in my childhood viewings of his show that could ingrain him into the deepest recesses of my memory.
I can, however, comment on why his cartoon can both delight and disturb me.
Postman Pat lives in an idyllic world. His village is a rural one, sparsely populated, and full of sunshine. There, an almost pastoral community help each other with their problems and show deep respect for the important social function of the Royal British Mail. There are problems, to be sure, bread that needs to be baked, fires to be put out, and pets that go missing. Essentially, however, this is a community almost untouched by any of the darker aspects of modernity.
I lived in Aberdeen, Scotland as a child and while the city is too big and full of granite buildings to match the community portrayed in the show, I visited plenty of sleepy towns in rural Scotland and Ireland that at least bore a resemblance. A visitor might thus imagine such a world to exist just beyond the last suburban stoplights of Edinburgh, Dublin, or London.
That is the charm of Postman Pat. It gives this rural community an on-screen, and portrays the deep cooperative and loving relationships that hold the village together. Disputes are negotiated, often with the help of a mediator, and everything works out in the end.
I have to say, though, that even as a child, there was something deeply disturbing about the world of Postman Pat. I remember distinctly a very simple emotional reaction that the show invoked in me. Seeing each of the roles and characters in the show, I felt like there was no one like me, and that, in fact, I could never ever imaginably fit, or want to fit, into the world of Postman Pat.
Pat might be especially puzzled by this since I’m a male blonde, heterosexual caucasian. But I was too young to problematize issues of minority representation, gender roles etc. that others might note today.
What always bothered me about the Postman Pat cartoons I saw was the feeling that we are trapped in that world, there was no leaving it. The mail always seemed to suddenly just, “be there” as if dropped out of heaven. Even more often, it seemed to circulate amongst a very small number of people. To me, it was a horribly lonely and homogenous world. While I’m sure we can find some episodes to the contrary, I was still distinctly left with the impression that there was nothing beyond the green hills with their cheerfully grazing animals, except perhaps an abyss.
As a child I was lucky enough to live in several places and countries. When living in Scotland we would travel every summer to both Norway and the US. My sister and I loved these trips, but at least to me, they often felt like pilgrimages or some kind of annual identity booster shot. My view of the world was thus very divided; split between “zones” of reality, each represented by a different geographic, cultural, and linguistic environment. In retrospect, these “zones” have huge overlap compared to my experiences in other places since. Even so, my childhood’s heterogeneous view of reality was highly incompatible with the world of Postman Pat. Everyone spoke the same language in Pat’s world and if postcards came from afar, it might as well have had pictures of unicorns and mermaids on the front, so mystical were these distant places.
Perhaps we can update Postman Pat for a globalized world. Perhaps we could have an EMS Ema, a Federal Express Fred, or a UPS Uma. They could deliver textiles from the sweat shops of Fujian to an Indian-run discount clothes store in Manhattan. They could make sure that a special copper shipment from Chile makes it to market, etc. Then again, it might be better to keep them out of trade altogether and just deliver personal things like an express wedding invitation to Fatos’s mother in Albania or a teddy bear to Henry’s girlfriend in Guatemala.