Alice Sage 

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen. They cannot ‘do’; they can only have things done to them.

 Tottie: The Story of a Dolls’ House (dir. Oliver Postgate) 

The 1984 children’s television series Tottie is infamous among British nostalgists for its climactic moment of horror, in which – spoiler alert – the light-hearted character Birdie catches fire and burns to death in the sitting room of her dolls’ house. Made by the legendary Smallfilms production duo Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin (best known for The Clangers, 1969 and Bagpuss, 1974), this stop-motion adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1947 children’s book has become a cult classic with ‘sinister credentials’ (Ricketts).

But rewatching Tottie recently, I was struck not by the shockingly violent ending, but by the tone of dread and unease which pervades all five of the series’ fifteen-minute episodes. The theme of anxiety is established in the opening voice-over, quoted above, and continues to build through the quietly disturbing narrative, until the death of Birdie comes as almost a relief or catharsis. This unnerving emotional response convinced me of Tottie’s place in the canon of British Folk Gothic. Before diving deeper into this genre definition, and the dark themes of doll-ontology, cursed inheritance, and the pervasive fear of nuclear disaster, it is worth summarising the plot of Tottie and the context of its production.

At the beginning, the little wooden Tottie and her doll-parents Mr Plantagenet and Birdie Plantagenet, her little brother Apple and their dog Darner live uncomfortably in a couple of shoe boxes. As the avuncular Narrator (voiced by Oliver Postgate) explains, Tottie knows that they’re not really all related; this group of dolls forms a cohesive chosen family, and they belong to two (human) sisters named Emily and Charlotte Dane. In Episode 1, Emily and Charlotte inherit their great-aunt’s dolls’ house, where Tottie had lived one hundred years ago. The dusty derelict house is soon transformed into the beautiful home of the dolls’ dreams. Unfortunately, the house also comes with an inhabitant: the vain and cruel doll Marchpane. Marchpane seizes ownership of the house, subjugates the Plantagenets as her servants and confines them to the kitchen and attic, with the exception of Apple, whom she claims as her own “little boy” and allows to play recklessly. Birdie rushes to save Apple from a burning candle, and, being made of celluloid, she explodes. At the end, Marchpane is donated to a museum, and the remaining Plantagenets reclaim their house.

Tottie was shown over five afternoons in the dedicated children’s 4:25pm spot on BBC1 (Ricketts). Rumer Godden’s literary agent Mike Shaw recalled “there was the small matter of selling a children’s film which depicted the incineration of a favourite character,” but Postgate and Firmin had a long, successful track record of animated children’s shows since the late 1950s, and were not averse to darker themes. Mark Fisher notes that their melancholic and eerie films conjured a bygone era when “public service could incubate the strange.”[i]  Famously based in a barn-studio two hours out of London, the pair often worked against the grain of conventional television.

Smallfilms’ characteristic home-spun aesthetic suited the story: Peter Firmin literally built a doll’s house as the set and his daughter Josie dressed up old dolls to fit the characters. The dolls’ stop-motion movements are jerky, restricted by their physical construction, and they have the bulky textures of dolls dressed in hand-made clothes (Figure 1). In some sequences, we can see the dressmaking pins holding Mr Plantagenet’s feet in place – a trace of the animator’s hand that, to me, underscores the vulnerability of the doll characters. For the infamous moment of Birdie’s death, Smallfilms used the conventions of horror filmmaking to great effect: the action intercuts between Apple leaning over the candle, and Birdie moving towards the camera until her face fills the frame. When she catches fire, we experience the explosion through a series of reaction shots on the faces of other characters, accompanied by flashing lights and a wisp of smoke – produced as physical special effects.

The television series is remarkably faithful in tone and content to the original novel, with swathes of dialogue reproduced verbatim in the script. Postgate even made a couple of changes that ramp up the emotional impact of the story even further: firstly, he gave Apple a scene where the small plush doll runs around the renovated dolls’ house pointing out its features in rhyming couplets, including the checkerboard floor, real stairs, kitchen pans and “mangle with its windy windy handle!” And, similarly, the expanded character of Birdie comes to life on screen as a spinning, dancing delight with a feather duster, improvising lilting songs to the strain of a music box (these earworms will haunt you for days after watching). Postgate’s additions of poetry and song make the characters more charming and engaging, and thus, their cruel separation and eventual death hurts even harder.

So why do I place Tottie in the rarified canon of Folk Gothic, as opposed to horror? Dawn Keetley, who has literally written the book on the subgenre, states, “the principal affect of the Folk Gothic is dread” (15). Dread suffuses Tottie from the first moment, when we are told that dolls are anxious beings that live in the shadow of danger. It is reinforced when we see them shiver in their shoe box, and Birdie says “I am afraid of fire.” It is heightened by the account of how Mr Plantagenet was “abused” by previous owners, and his body and mind have been scarred by their mistreatment; he is nervous, self-doubting, and he wears a surgical sock on one foot and a plaster on one hand. No wonder the dolls are anxious.

Tottie bears many hallmarks of the Gothic genre more generally, most obviously the setting in a crenelated ancestral mansion. Dolls’ houses are especially Gothic; these houses-within-houses have disorienting layouts of unconnected rooms, strange combinations of scale, and they are always on the brink of decay. According to literary scholar Chris Baldick, Gothic tales feature “a fearful sense of inheritance in time [combined] with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space … to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (xix). This is basically a plot summary of Tottie.

Despite its ruined appearance (Figure 2), Tottie’s inherited dolls’ house is initially welcomed by both the children and the dolls. But this gift is freighted with a “fearful” addition. In typical Gothic fashion, the house comes with an existing and unwanted inhabitant – Tottie’s forgotten foe from a hundred years before. Marchpane is a true Gothic villain, a beautiful but evil woman enforcing aristocratic rule from the “cruelly repressive and deluded past” and causing disintegration by breaking up the family (Baldick xiii). The name “Marchpane,” Tottie explains, refers to a “heavy sweet stuff like old-fashioned almond icing.” This sickly aristocratic food contains no nourishment and is meant only for display: “that was a good name for her.” Marchpane enforces class inequality – she assumes the airs of “a grand lady” and banishes the Plantagenets to the kitchen. The political message of the programme rings loud and clear: elitism and entitlement are existential threats. The “valuable” blonde doll is the monstrous evil force, not the rag-tag chosen family of the Plantagenets.

Folk Gothic media, according to Keetley, “tilts towards… objects” as active and powerful forces, with a subsequent “loosening of anthropocentrism” (9). Although Tottie’s dolls have consciousness, and experience anxiety, fear and desire, they are not actually human in any way. The dolls have a distinct self-aware doll-ontology as manufactured objects, and they explicitly talk and think about the materials they are made of. Tottie’s sense of self comes from being wooden. Though dismissed as “shoddy stuff” by the leather-and-china Marchpane, Tottie has an almost religious connection to “the tree of whose wood she was made, of its strength and the sap that ran through it… ‘a little of that tree is in me, I am a little of that tree.’” Later on, she reassures herself: “I shall not fall for fear of Marchpane. Trees, good trees, don’t fall down in storms.” Despite her small size, she is rooted to the ancient earth. Through her origins in the great tree, Tottie exists in the “ecological timescale” of nature, which is another key feature of Folk Gothic tales (Keetley 50). Within that long duration, Tottie also experiences the circular temporality of girlhood; she has been passed from generation to generation – each time she is enlivened through play, eventually forgotten, only to be rediscovered again. These two rhythms – the expanse of the great tree and the blink of a single childhood – coexist within the grain of her substance.

Birdie, on the other hand, is a flimsy doll made of celluloid, a highly flammable manmade substance associated with cosmetics and film stock. As she struggles to comprehend the loss of her precious pink bedroom, and then the abduction of her child, Birdie becomes increasingly light, bright, and hollow, until she appears “as if she might fly away.” Their non-human materiality is not incidental, but shapes the dolls’ identities, personalities, and tragic destinies.

Objects in Folk Gothic stories, however, are not just non-human, they must also display “thing-power,” the capacity to act (Keetley 39). At the outset, we are told that the dolls in Tottie “cannot choose… cannot do,” but actually, they do have agency through the power of wishing. Collectively, the Plantagenets wish for the dolls’ house, and their wish comes true. At Christmas, Tottie successfully wishes for a parasol for Birdie, a marble for Apple, and a toy Post Office for Mr Plantagenet. Their power is limited, and the mechanics of the wish are not clear, yet the dolls are able to manifest the things that they desire. Initially, this doll-child relationship in Tottie anticipates D. W. Winnicott’s seminal writings on “transitional” objects. He described how children’s imaginative connections with objects blur the line between objectivity and subjectivity. This is the porous realm of imaginative play, “to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (2). We know, from our own memories, how toys come to life when they are played with. What is play if not a magical force that animates the non-human? As most succinctly expressed by Mr Plantagenet, the games of Emily and Charlotte “give us life.” The children who pass through Tottie’s life are the “folk” – they are the quaint beings who invest objects with magical powers. Childhood is a folk culture, of orally transmitted rituals of play and imagination, strange languages and beliefs.

The careful balance of human power and thing-power is overturned by Marchpane’s arrival. Once installed in the house, Marchpane only needs to speak – “this whole house is mine” – and her dark demands are fulfilled by the child Emily. As Mr Plantagenet exclaims, “I think she is wishing straight to Emily and making her do what she wants!” It is through Emily that Marchpane claims the master bedroom; it is through Emily that Tottie is made cook and Mr Plantagenet made butler. With suggestions of enchantment or mind-control, Marchpane smirks, “I do not need to give the orders. It is done for me.” In a typical Folk Gothic manner, “humans [have] become the malleable resources of the non-human” (Keetley 48). Here is the sickening horror: the roles have been reversed, and the human child has become the plaything of the doll. It’s an ethical nightmare that the desires of the heavy-weight aristocratic doll seem to have more force in the human world than those of the small, wooden, hollow, and damaged dolls, however hard they wish. It takes the explosive death of one of the non-human characters for Emily to become disenchanted and make amends for her mistakes.

Which brings us to my last intuition about the dread that hangs over Tottie: it is an infusion of the threat of nuclear war that saturated the world outside the programme. The early 1980s saw a dramatic escalation in the Cold War, marked by increased military spending, nuclear testing and ground combat. In 1981, American anti-Soviet cruise missiles were positioned on UK bases (most famously at RAF Greenham Common, the site of a women’s peace camp). Meanwhile, Western governments reassured their anxious populations that nuclear weapons were sensible deterrents.

Postgate was always a determined pacifist (he went to prison rather than serve in WW2), and in this period he became a passionate and active campaigner for disarmament. In his memoir, the making of Tottie is barely mentioned, as he was so busy at the time writing pamphlets, speaking at meetings and on the radio, and travelling to conferences. The relevant chapter begins, “Today, looking back at the 1980s with its strategies, threats and counterthreats of universal destruction, it all seems like a bad dream” (385). I can imagine that Postgate recognised in Tottie’s source material a lesson about delusional elites, cursed gifts, and tragic and avoidable destruction. I think this post-WW2 story resonated with him and the work he was doing. In 1982, when the contracts for Tottie took longer than expected, he recalled, “I was quite glad of the delay because it meant I could get ready to go to New York to attend the United Nations’ Second Special Session on Disarmament… at the beginning of June” (390). We can see where his priorities lay at the time, and appreciate how the sense of nuclear dread seeped into the children’s programme. In his adaptation, Postgate didn’t shy away from the dark consequences of shared fantasy: he emphasised how Emily was being led into irrational behaviour by a vain, stupid character – and established the ticking ‘time bomb’ of fire and explosion that inevitably comes as the end.[ii]

Tottie is a much more interesting and complex piece of filmmaking than its “doll murder!” reputation would suggest; examining the series through the lens of Folk Gothic, I have shown that creeping dread, cursed objects, and Gothic inheritance all create an atmosphere of anxiety and disquiet long before Birdie runs into the flames. As a work of Gothic filmmaking, Tottie explores knotty themes of power, class inequality, and the ethics of non-human agency. We’ve seen a resurgence in Gothic media in the last few years, a response, it is said, to the “institutional collapse, religious fanaticism, and the uneasy imbalances of power” that destabilise our own world (Monteiro). I think it’s quite likely that the dread that I felt watching Tottie rose from my own sense of powerlessness and anxiety. I finish writing this article as another deluded blonde sits in a big white house, giving free rein to their own debased desires. Right in front of them, small anxious people are made to suffer for it, and innocent beings burn to death. Postgate would tell us that we are not dolls, and to change things, we must do more than just wish.

---

Notes

[i] Earlier Smallfilms productions Bagpuss and The Clangers come up in discussions of British folk horror; Jez Conolly wrote a chapter on Smallfilms’ “comforting strangeness”; Mark Fisher described Bagpuss as a document of “Weird England”; and the saggy cloth cat even earned a joking mention in the introduction to Folk Horror on Film (Bayman and Donnelly 1).

[ii] It seems significant that Tottie was broadcast the same year that the terrifying anti-war nuclear annihilation film, Threads (dir. Mick Jackson) was shown on BBC2 in the UK.

---

Works Cited

Bayman, Louis and K J Donnelly. “Introduction: What Makes the Folk Horrific?” Folk Horror on Film: The Return of the British Repressed, edited by Bayman and Donnelly, Manchester University Press, 2023, pp. 1-22.

Conolly, Jez. “‘This Calm Serene Orb’: A Personal Recollection of the Comforting Strangeness Found in the Worlds of Smallfilms.” The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson, Routledge, 2023, pp. 218-26.

Fisher, Mark. “The Voice of Weird Paternalism.” K-punk, 16 December 2008.

Godden, Rumer. The Dolls’ House. 1947. Puffin, 1977.

Keetley, Dawn. Folk Gothic. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Monteiro, Isabelle. “The Gothic Revival of Cinema: Monsters of Our Own Making.” The Strand Magazine, 23 March 2026. 

Postgate, Oliver. Seeing Things: A Memoir. Canongate, 2009.

Ricketts, Ben. “Tottie.” Curious British Telly, 17 October 2017.

Shaw, Mike. “Letter: Oliver Postgate Obituary.” The Guardian, 13 December 2008.

Tottie: The Story of a Dolls House. Dir. Oliver Postgate. 1984. The Dragons Friendly Society. 2009. DVD.

Winnicott, D. W. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” 1958. Playing and Reality. Routledge, 1989.