Altering metadata to add inheritance

As an experiement, I want to turn a number of identically structured
tables into "child" tables of a template.  That is, I want to do
something like:

alter table foo_01 rename to foo_01_old;
create table foo_01 () inherits (foo_template);
insert into foo_01 select * from foo_01_old;
drop table foo_01_old;

a whole lotta times, for different values of 'foo_01'.  I suspect
there's a way to do this directly in the pg_class table.  Does anyone
have a tried and safe approach?