BLUE PETER
 On 16 October 1958, a former beauty queen and a former Army
officer sat down to introduce the first edition of a program that
for over 40 years has been compulsive viewing for any child
wanting to learn about life in other countries, about caring for
pets or how to make a fully operational Centurion tank out of
detergent bottles, toilet rolls and sticky-backed plastic.
She was 21 year old Leila Williams, the previous year's Miss
Great Britain, and he was 25 year old actor Christopher Trace. The
show was Blue Peter.
The show was created by John Hunter Blair, who later died from
Multiple Sclerosis while watching an episode of his brainchild.
Originally just a seven week experiment, it began as a 15 minute
program for toddlers, with items on trains and dolls, and soon
grew into the show we know and love today.
Under the ever-vigilant eye of the show's (now retired) Editor
Biddy Baxter, numerous presenters have encouraged viewers to raise
millions of pounds in the famous Blue Peter Appeals.
Instead of sending in money, children have been urged to
collect old clothes, used stamps, paperback books or milk bottle
tops, and by 1971 it was estimated that 7½ tons of silver paper
had been sent in. I can't remember how many Blue Peter Appeals
there have been, but as a child, every lifeboat I ever saw while
at the seaside had a Blue Peter sticker on it.
Some 3,000 letters poured into the production office each week,
and when the show held a competition to design a train of the
future, there were 110,000 entrants ranging in age from two to 72.
 Christopher
Trace got the job of presenter as a result of his expertise at
building model railways. "It was while constructing the
layouts that I invented the phrase 'Here's one I made earlier'
because we didn't have instant glue in those days".
Chris's layouts were a feature of the show - and a source of
entertainment for others, as he once discovered to his cost;
"I remember a particularly complicated layout that I had gone
through in great detail with the director . . . before we went for
a tea break. It was planned down to the last detail - all the
points were set and so on."
"But when we did the show, trains were coming from
everywhere except the places I was expecting. It was chaos. I just
couldn't understand what had happened. Then I discovered that
during the tea break someone had sneaked in from the next studio
and had been playing with all the trains. There was a big enquiry.
The culprit was . . . Richard Dimbleby".
Such is the esteem in which Blue Peter has always been held
that in 1971 Princess Anne took part in a Blue Peter Royal Safari
to Kenya with Valerie Singleton. Ah, Val . . . the mere mention of
her name conjures up days of an innocent childhood.
Valerie Singleton , hyperactive Yorkshireman John Noakes and
Peter Purves were like family when I was a kid. These three
regularly shared their giant stamp albums with us and taught us
how to make a nuclear reactor out of milk bottle tops.
 Without
Blue Peter I would have never have known how to make
Christmas decorations from coat hangers and candles, I would never
have realised that you can make guide dogs for the blind simply by
collecting big balls of silver foil, I would have never have
realised we needed seven hundred thousand Lifeboats on the British
coast . . . and . . . my freshly awoken hormones wouldn't have had
Valerie Singleton to fall in love with.
Blue Peter made an especially great viewing trifecta on Mondays
and Thursdays with Jackanory and Captain Pugwash. Blue Peter even
had it's own cartoon comic strip called Bleep and Booster.
The Outer Space-dwelling Bleep and Booster were created by
William Timym, the sculptor who also created a statue of Petra. He
wrote the stories and drew the pictures, and Peter Hawkins (who
also provided the voices of The Flowerpot Men and Captain
Pugwash)
provided the narration and voices.
John Noakes (pictured above right) was the ubiquitous clown, daredevil and keeper of
Petra, Jason and especially Shep, his constant companion. In later
years, Noakes went on to complain bitterly about his BP days (and
the salary he was paid).
Many other people have since joined Biddy Baxter's army and
presented BP over the years, but to millions of kids in Britain,
Blue Peter will always be Peter, John and Valerie. They never
talked down to us and there was always an Alsatian (Petra), a duck
or an elephant to run riot in the studio.
 In
one of the most often requested clip of film from British TV
history, Lulu, a young Sri Lankan elephant from Chessington Zoo
visited the Blue Peter studio with her keeper, Alec.
Lulu had already left a deposit on the studio floor before
peeing rather too close to Val's foot.
This turned the floor into a skating rink, and hard as he
tried, the handler was unable to prevent Lulu dragging him across
the studio until he eventually slid ignominiously through the lot.
As John Noakes cheerfully said goodbye, he stepped back unaware
of what his foot was about to land in. His parting words were
"Oh dear, I've trodden right in it".
On 16 October 1998, Blue Peter was 40 years old and on 4
January 2000 they finally dug up the time capsule they had buried
in the 1970s (I remember it as though it were just . . . er . . .
in the 1970s). Unfortunately most of the contents had turned to
slush.
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