Bed-time tips from the NHS

the single most successful health campaign in this country ever.

SIDS rates have dropped by 85% as a result. The number of lives saved by it in Britain alone is definitely more than 20,000 – and around the world it could be hundreds of thousands.

Despite its success the 25th anniversary would have passed by were it not for young producers at BBC Radio Berkshire, where I do a daily show, who thought they’d like to mark it.

They put together a programme, airing tomorrow, which reminds us that a quarter of a century ago something really big happened in global child care – and it didn’t come easily. Getting John Major’s Government to act was like pulling teeth. If I hadn’t been famous, I wouldn’t have got anywhere.

At the time I had just given up years of presenting Good Morning Britain on TV- am to have my third baby, Sebastian. His sudden death made huge news and prompted a massive debate: “What is cot death?”

All I knew was that I had gone upstairs to the boys’ bedrooms to sing Happy Birthday to my eldest son Oliver, who was four that day.

I remember thinking it was odd that Sebastian hadn’t woken us all up at least an hour earlier. I went into his nursery and found a little stiff cold statue where my cuddly warm baby had gone to sleep the night before. Afterwards, everyone was so kind. Years before we might have been treated with suspicion, but thankfully attitudes were more enlightened.

However what astounded me and my then- husband Mike was the complacency surrounding cot death.

Medics said it was “a terrible fact of life” and people started to tell us to cheer up and have another baby.

Thankfully because it was such big news we were contacted by people in New Zealand, where they had found out how to stop cot death.

Well, now I knew why I was famous. It enabled me to get something done. I travelled to New Zealand – which once had the highest cot death rate in the world – and interviewed every expert there. It was amazing.

Whenever there was a death a team had been sent to investigate every factor from whether the babies wore nighties or babygros, whether they sucked dummies, drank formula, whether the windows were open, if there was a pet dog – you name it.

All this information was compared with similar data from babies who had not died, the idea being to try to find what might have made the difference. The data was fed into the computers and after 18 months what was coming out so strongly had no medical or scientific explanation... but it could not be ignored.

The babies who were dying were the ones lying on their tummies.

The experts contacted New Zealand broadcaster Judy Bailey and asked her to head up a TV campaign urging parents to lay their babies down to sleep on their backs. Within weeks, the cot death rate had plummeted.

And at that very time, thousands of miles away, I had been happily putting my baby down to sleep on his tummy as we were all told to do.Why hadn’t the message spread across the world?

That’s the question I was burning to ask when I got home.

I found one amazing professor in Bristol had been carrying out a NZ- style study in his area but he couldn’t get anyone to listen and was booed off stage at a convention.

I immediately demanded a similar campaign in Britain though it took every journalistic tactic in the book to embarrass the Government and Department of Health to respond.

In the end, Health Minister Virginia Bottomley agreed to a campaign. When we talked of it being broadcast, she actually said to me young mothers did not watch TV.

I was happy to remind her a year later that the Government’s own figures said 87 per cent of mums who got the message got it off the telly.

The enduring legacy is that young mums and dads, like my young producers at BBC Radio Berkshire, still value the vital message of the campaign. It is as true today as it was then.

BBC Radio Berkshire tomorrow at 10am, the Anne Diamond show: Sebastian’s Story.