How John Noakes (and Shep) forged a TV golden age
John Noakes, who’s died aged 83, was a far more complex character than his Blue Peter fans ever knew. But his infectious enthusiasm helped forge the golden age of children’s television
THE death of John Noakes at 83 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s was ‘a blessing’, his family said yesterday.
The Yorkshireman worked on Blue Peter for 12 years in the Sixties and Seventies – many of them with his dog Shep – and remains its longest-serving presenter.
In a statement issued on behalf of the family, friend Wendy Downes said Noakes died peacefully on Sunday morning, adding: ‘Whilst he will be greatly missed, his release from ill health must be counted as a blessing.
‘His many escapades with Shep during his time with Blue Peter will live on in many people’s memories – and that is how his family would like him remembered.’
WHICH was John Noakes’s most preposterous and absurdly dangerous stunt during his 12 years as a Blue Peter presenter? Was it the time he climbed 140ft up a set of rickety ladders, hauled himself over a vast protruding ledge to help clean the pigeon droppings off the top of Nelson’s Column – without safety harness – and then had to do it all over again because the sound engineer had not recorded it properly? Or his five-mile freefall sky dive with the Red Devils, which earned him a civilian world record which he held for 12 years?
Perhaps it was his near-death experience on the two-man bobsleigh Cresta Run at St Moritz, when the sleigh hit a hole in the ice, overturned and injured him? And then nearly dying again – of embarrassment, this time – when live on Blue Peter, he removed his trousers to show off the enormous bruises on his thigh and realised he was wearing his wife Vicky’s knickers which he’d put on by accident in the dark that morning?
But the silliest stunt, surely, was standing on the wing of a Tiger Moth aeroplane holding a long pole with a pin on one end and trying to pop dozens of floating balloons as he flew past.
‘Unbelievably I managed to pop the odd one. Mad!’ he said. Particularly so, as he later claimed he’d been uninsured by the BBC throughout (something his bosses later denied).
Whatever. Frankly, it’s a wonder Blue Peter’s longest- serving presenter passed 40, let alone made it to 83. Looking back from the health and safety-obsessed 21st century, his presenting style was a cross between Who Dares Wins, Tommy Cooper and Animal Magic.
Who could forget his on-air tussle with Lulu, the incontinent baby elephant who trod on his foot and pooed all over the studio, or his attempts to control bouncy border collie Shep, the Blue Peter dog?
John Noakes. Blue Peter. Shep. Mere mention of these names will conjure up in many a warm nostalgic image of innocence and a gentler, pre-internet age when children’s television was all about programmes such as Captain Pugwash, sticky- back- plastic handicraft and when a Blue Peter badge was the apogee of childhood ambition.
John Noakes was a much-loved symbol of that golden era.
In truth, though, he found live television so terrifying at first that it made him feel as though he’d been ‘stripped naked’.
‘I actually shook with fear,’ he said. ‘I went through murder. I even went to a hypnotist and a faith healer to try to get me out of it.’
His solution was to develop an extrovert on- screen persona to hide behind. ‘ That idiot John Noakes’ – as he called his public alter ego – would constantly goof about, play the fool and endeared himself to millions of children. ‘I switch the personality on when I turn up to do the job, and off when I leave,’ he once said.
The other John was a shy, awkward and deeply private man who remained utterly unchanged by his fame or success – and was notoriously prickly in interviews.
‘I’m a very solitary person,’ he once said. ‘I’ve got a personality complex or something. Off screen I’m not extrovert at all – it’s like controlled schizophrenia. No one will ever know the real John Noakes.’
He
was born on March 6, 1934, the only child of a mill worker in the village of Shelf, near Halifax, West Yorkshire. His parents divorced bitterly when he was nine and John lived with his granny for two years before winning a scholarship to boarding school.
(Noakes wasn’t his real name, but the surname of Alfie Noakes, a well-known Canadian trumpeter who later became his stepfather. But John always refused to reveal his original surname on the grounds that he didn’t like it.)
At school he excelled at crosscountry running and gymnastics, but little else. His parents’ split had sent him off-kilter – he was always in trouble, quickly sank to the remedial class and left with no qualifications at 16. He joined the RAF as a mechanic and then moved to Heathrow as an engine fitter for BOAC before changing course to acting.
‘I wanted to escape from myself,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I had much to offer.’ So he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, paying for it by working as a lift boy in a hotel and doing early morning cleaning.
He showed promise. He spent six months in the Broadway production of Arnold Wesker’s Chips With everything, notched up small TV parts in series such as Redcap and Mogul and then moved back to work in rep in Surrey where he met his wife, Vicky. Sir Laurence Olivier once requested him for a part, but he couldn’t iron out his broad Yorkshire accent in time.
His Blue Peter role came out of the blue in 1965 when the show’s formidable editor, Biddy Baxter, was on the lookout for a third presenter to join Valerie Singleton and Christopher Trace. On a trip back to her home town she saw Noakes’s picture in the Leicester Mercury – he was playing Hobson’s Choice in the city – and thought he was perfect, recalling him as ‘incredibly fresh faced – he looked about 14’.
He was actually 29 – a dinosaur compared with today’s children’s presenters, with an accent in contrast to the BBC’s received pronunciation of the time.
He was also tired after six years of repertory theatre, fancied a change, passed the audition and made his first appearance on December 30, 1965. Behind the scenes, though, it wasn’t all smiles and sticky-back plastic.
Noakes, as he freely admitted, could be ‘an awkward sod at times’. Baxter, meanwhile, was a determined character who refused her presenters editorial input, insisted they work from scripts, not autocue, and set them a demanding schedule of twice-weekly live pro- grammes and a punishing schedule of location filming.
Instead of being grateful to Baxter for recruiting him, Noakes loathed her.
He complained the BBC never paid him what they’d promised, railed at the workload and later referred to Baxter as ‘an awful woman’ and ‘a bully who treated me like some country yokel from Yorkshire’. In one fit of pique he
said he wished he’d never set foot inside the Blue Peter studio.
‘Given my time again I wouldn’t have done Blue Peter,’ he said. ‘The pressure was terrible. One year I did nine weeks with only one and a half days off. I collapsed on the floor and couldn’t go on. That’s the nearest I came to a breakdown.’
Happily, relations with his copresenters – first with Singleton and Trace and, later Peter Purves and Lesley Judd – were much happier. And his love for Shep – the show’s big border collie that would never behave, even though Noakes said ‘Get down, Shep!’ so often that it became a national catchphrase – was real.
Shep wasn’t his first Blue Peter dog. In 1966, Patch, son of Petra, the first Blue Peter dog, was put in Noakes’s care, but died suddenly aged just five, leaving Noakes distraught. However, he and Shep were inseparable. During his final two years on Blue Peter, they travelled the country for a series called Go With Noakes, in which Shep watched quizzically, one black ear cocked, as John tossed cabers at The Highland Games and flew with the Red Arrows.
But when he left in 1975, everything turned sour after the BBC agreed he could keep Shep, but only if he promised not to use him in other TV work, particularly commercials. ‘Shep was part of the family. He’d been with me since he was a puppy,’ he said. ‘To them, little Shep was only a studio prop. So I went on the warpath...’
The upshot was Shep stayed with Noakes, but with strings firmly attached and the latter was unforgivably banned from the Blue Peter 25th anniversary celebrations. After leaving the BBC, he wrote a children’s book, The Flight Of The Magic Clog, and in 1982, desperate to get away and after persuading his reluctant wife to put her ladies’ fashion shop up for sale, he and Vicky set sail around the world.
It ended in disaster. During the first leg – to the Caribbean – their boat was hit by a 60ft wave. They were shipwrecked, the boat was lost, but they were rescued by a passing tanker.
It took them two years and cost a small fortune to get seaborne again. This time they took a detour via Majorca and never left, eventually buying a small cottage on top of a hill on the Spanish island in the village of Andratx where they settled, made shorter trips all around Europe, ran a boat rental business and took up tap dancing, gardening and painting.
While John always regretted giving up acting, he was unsentimental about Blue Peter, kept few mementoes and gave away all his Blue Peter badges. But he continued to love Shep.
In 1987, Noakes popped up out of the blue on a BBC programme called Fax, presented by Bill Oddie, to break some ‘very bad news’ and, choking back tears, he informed the nation that Shep had died.
MEANWHILE, his feud with Biddy Baxter – something she always denied – simmered on, and in 2008 he turned down an invitation to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace to mark 50 years of Blue Peter, only relenting when the Queen sent him a personal message naming him as her favourite presenter.
The same year, during an appearance on The Weakest Link, he became visibly distressed when presenter Anne Robinson asked about Shep.
In recent years, he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, although his illness had only been known to close friends and family.
Nearly two years ago there was a massive manhunt in Majorca when he went missing for more than ten hours while walking hear his home.
It was a particularly hot day and he had no water. He was eventually found, apparently collapsed in a roadside storm drain less than a mile from his house, and airlifted to hospital. He recovered, but his health continued to deteriorate.
Noakes was a complicated man with a prickly personality who described himself as ‘a loner better off without people’.
But he and Vicky, 73 – whose son, Mark, 53, is a landscape gardener – were clearly happy.
Their 54-year marriage weathered his long absences in repertory theatre, the BBC years when he was so busy he only saw his family once a fortnight as he popped home for clean clothes, his mad dangerous stunts, bouts of grumpiness and bitter resentment, and – perhaps far harder to endure – 24 hours a day on board a teeny yacht with only each other for company.
And through all that, Vicky once insisted she couldn’t remember them ever having argued. Not even about Shep.