Gabriel the Toad was the only character in the series who could move freely without the use of stop-frame animation. Scenes featuring him playing the banjo and singing would have taken quite a bit of time if filmed with the stop-frame method, so Peter Firmin created a mechanism that helped him control Gabriel through a hole in his can. The character was based on a real toad that lived in the basement area of the flat that Peter and Joan rented in Twickenham beside the River Thames. Gabriel (named after Walter Gabriel in "The Archers", a long-running British radio soap opera) was originally made for Firmin’s live ITV programme "The Musical Box". Postgate chose him to be one of the characters in "Bagpuss" and he was made into a new, slightly larger version.