A product of Blue Peter golden age

I have to admit he’s got a point. If you want to know how to ease a tortoise out of hibernation, create a lighthouse out of a washing-up bottle and a couple of Dairylea boxes or build yourself an Italian sunken garden, I’m your girl.

Even today small phrases and fully formed Blue Peter feature material suggestions will pop unbidden from my rosebud lips.

I’ll give you a recent example. Strolling along a cliff-top path in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago I spotted something interesting in the water below.

“Oooh come and look at this,” I squeaked excitedly. “Is that a seal and her pup down there?”

At this point my husband laughed so much that half a pasty spluttered out of his mouth and over the precipice.

I think it was the words ‘her pup’ that prompted his sarcastic observation that not everything in the world around us could be explained by my Blue Peter book of animal husbandry.

In Biddy Baxter World those two grey specks would almost certainly have turned out to be “a seal and her pup”, but in ours they were, in fact, a couple of small rocks.

I was a bit crushed, to be honest, but thinking about it later I had to admit to myself that my super cynical other half has a point when it come to my view of the universe.

It’s true that regular exposure to Blue Peter and all its works throughout my formative years influenced me more than I’d like to admit.

Obviously I’m talking about the days before the viewer phone vote scandal or the time when the then controller of BBC Children’s TV, Lorraine Heggessy, went live at teatime on a Tuesday to apologise for Richard Bacon’s drug snorting.

Fortunately I didn’t have to live through the shame of Blue Peter because I was a viewer in the glory days. My presenters (something of a gold standard, I feel) were the hallowed triumvirate: John Noakes, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves.

The raciest thing I can recall any of them doing was sitting in a Swedish sauna in their swimsuits with some strategically placed towels. I also have a vague memory of Val showing off her diamond ring when she announced her engagement to Pete Murray, which seemed a tad risqué at the time. The usually strait-laced, sensible Val was definitely a bit giggly, which I found unsettling.

The point was that twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays, my mum could happily plonk my brother and I in front of the telly, secure in the knowledge that we were about to watch something innocent, wholesome and educational.

We never watched Magpie – I think my mum thought shaggy Mick Robinson and leggy Susan Stranks were a bit too groovy for children of five and seven. But she needn’t have worried as our loyalty was unswerving.

Blue Peter World was endlessly fascinating.

I can still recall the frisson of fear I felt when John Noakes climbed to the top of Nelson’s column (without a safety net – or insurance – apparently) and I remember Val’s costumed report from Versailles where she followed in the tragic footsteps of Marie Antoinette.

I remember John cutting his hand so badly live on air once when demonstrating a recipe that the workbench was covered in blood. “Good thing it’s mostly tomatoes,” he winced bravely at the camera.

I remember being a bit jealous of Val bathing a baby orang-utan and accompanying Princess Anne on a trip to Kenya. I remember dare-devil John variously parachuting out of a plane with the Red Devils, learning to be a trapeze artist, falling out of a bobsleigh and then, shockingly, showing his bruised bottom on live TV.

And I remember Peter…um…taking Petra to obedience classes.

Who can forget the annual craft extravaganza that was the creation of the Blue Peter advent crown out of four coat hangers, five baubles and a lot of fire-retardant tinsel?

How my brother and I begged to be allowed to make one of these – pleas that my mum wisely ignored. I’m sure there must be a million sad, moth-eaten advent crowns gathering dust in lofts from Bushey to Blair Atholl.

Mind you, my father is still the proud possessor of a festive snow storm toy I made from a Kilner jar, two tablespoons of desiccated coconut, some plaster of Paris and a plastic tiger. I think Val used a toy deer as the centrepiece of her winter scene, but we only had a set of jungle figures.

Back in those heady days, before the cursed arrival of Children in Need or Comic Relief, the annual Blue Peter Christmas appeal was pretty much the only altruistic campaign that galvanised the viewing nation. And it wasn’t your money they wanted – nothing so vulgar.

No, Val, John and Pete were the vanguard of the recycling movement, exhorting under-11s everywhere to empty parental cutlery drawers, cut up their stamp collections, save up their (washed) milk bottle tops and sacrifice their odd socks.

It was quite a moment, let me tell you, when the cameras switched over to the flashing studio totaliser where the generosity of Britain’s children was measured on a weekly basis.

I’m pretty certain that the current crop of eco-conscious 40-year-olds can trace the roots of their own green awareness back to the success of those appeals and possibly to Percy Thrower’s reports on the progress of his marrows from the BP greenhouse. And, yes, you read that correctly, they actually allowed a pensioner to appear on children’s TV.

I’m willing to bet that Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittinstall were Blue Peter viewers. The hands-on format of their programmes betrays a direct lineage – although, thankfully, we never saw Val butchering a pig at teatime.

As this fabulous programme celebrates its 50th anniversary, I’m proud to be a product of the golden age of Blue Peter.

It’s thanks to Val, John, Peter and later to Lesley Judd – who I could never quite accept as a worthy replacement to Val – that I now have a shallow but encyclopaedic knowledge of a quite stunning assortment of esoteric subjects ranging from chelonian constipation and chimpanzee sexing to Florence Nightingale’s role at Scutari, the duties of a midshipman on Nelson’s Victory and the symbolism of Japanese Noh Theatre.

I also know how to make a cracking Tracy Island…just pass me the sticky-backed plastic.