John Noakes
Boyish Blue Peter presenter known for his acts of derring-do and his partnership with his dog Shep
JOHN NOAKES, who has died aged 83, was a television personality whose courage, humour and irrepressible boyish enthusiasm made him an outstanding presenter of Blue Peter. Noakes, in collaboration with Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves
– a triumvirate widely regarded as the show’s greatest ever team of presenters – rapidly became famous for his fearlessness, especially at altitude, and a mischievous vivacity which resonated powerfully with viewers of all ages.
The broadcaster, rarely seen on screen without his faithful border collie, Shep, adopted the name of Noakes in his teens, sensing that his original surname of Bottomley might be incompatible with fame. His nom de guerre was borrowed from his stepfather, the Canadian trumpeter Alfie Noakes, and he never publicly acknowledged his birth name. “There are some secrets,” he told an interviewer in 1998, “which I have to keep.”
A native of Shelf, a village between Halifax and Bradford, Noakes’s bold Yorkshire vowel sounds contrasted markedly with the orthodox diction of BBC children’s broadcasters. His predecessors had tended to cling tenaciously to a kind of stylised elocution which today is favoured only by elderly members of the Royal family. His accent, like his tousled brown hair and a facial expression indicative of defiance and curiosity, enhanced the perception of Noakes as a carefree, sometimes reckless, maverick. Probably his most famous moment in his 12 years on Blue Peter came when Lulu, a baby elephant, urinated and defecated on the studio floor: a double first for a guest on the programme. “Eh up,” said Noakes. “Get off me foot.”
He was already 31 when he was recruited to Blue Peter by the producer Biddy Baxter, who had seen his picture in a local newspaper in Leicester, where Noakes was playing Willy Mossop in a 1965 touring production of the Harold Brighouse play Hobson’s Choice. The character of Mossop – a plain-speaking Northerner of humble origin with a more affluent wife – may have had some resonance for John Noakes, whose wife Vicky, a solicitor’s daughter, had her own boutique in Farnham, Surrey.
Noakes made his first appearance on Blue Peter, then broadcast live and twice weekly, on December 30 1965. His co-presenters were Singleton and Christopher Trace; the latter was replaced by Peter Purves in 1967. Members of this new team, which routinely attracted audiences in excess of eight million, appeared to complement each other perfectly. Noakes might have been a son of the soil in a Thomas Hardy novel, or a youthful Scout leader, 35 but not quite out of school, while Purves, in his puce flares, was viewed as a teenage heart-throb. Singleton, who never married, was a woman whose fiercely independent character gave rise to rumours of lesbianism which she denied with some warmth.
Blue Peter had begun in 1958, produced by John Hunter Blair, who once boasted that he had “travelled the whole of Europe on two phrases: ‘Will you please take your clothes off?’ and ‘My friend will pay.’”
The regime introduced by Baxter and her friend and confidant Edward Barnes was innovative and hugely successful; but tensions between the producers and presenters – especially Noakes – ran high. The acts of daring which the Yorkshireman performed for Blue Peter included climbing factory chimneys, shinning up the final five yards of the 143ft mast on HMS Ganges at Shotley, and making a parachute jump from 25,000ft (then the highest ever completed by a civilian). The dangers inherent in such projects were one of the many sources of aggravation between Noakes and his two main producers.
“I had been enjoying playing Willy Mossop,” he recalled, after leaving the show. “A few months later I was in a hotel, preparing for a parachute jump. I remember looking at the menu and thinking, will the producers mind if I have the steak? Then I thought: ‘Oh, bloody hell, I’ll have it. I might be dead tomorrow’.” The highest fee he ever received for a Blue Peter show was £96.50.
“I have done the high wire,” he said, “I have done racing car driving. But those are things people do every day, as a profession. I was lucky. I was one of those men who has got no imagination.”
On arduous physical assignments, he was often placed in the care of an ex-sergeant major called Tim Hutton. “The first thing that I did with Noakes,” Hutton said, “was to hammer him round the assault course at Aldershot. Going from A to B is easy. John Noakes was a man that could go from B to C. He could, that is, once I was hammering him.”
Noakes maintained an affectionate relationship with Sergeant Hutton, but found it harder to take orders from Baxter. “One day I was late,” he recalled. “I hated being late. I apologised to my interviewee and said that I would just get a quick cup of tea, then see them in the studio. Baxter said: ‘You are wanted in the studio.’ I said, ‘I know. I am going to get some tea.’ ‘In the studio, now.’ I got the tea, went back into the studio, and she was still banging on. I turned to her,” Noakes continued, “and said, ‘If you don’t shut your ------- mouth, I will knock your ------- teeth out.’
By the mid-1970s the physical and mental demands of a twice-weekly programme had left the presenter, in his words, a “physical and mental wreck”. On one occasion, he remembered, he suffered an acute panic attack. “I ended up on the floor,” he said, “shaking. Baxter came down. She was standing over me like the witch in Snow White. That made me worse.”
John Noakes was born at Shelf on March 6 1934. His father, Arthur Bottomley, was a mill worker. As a young boy John spent much time with a neighbour, a Mr Brook, who told him exotic stories that helped inspire his 1979 children’s book The Flight of the
Magic Clog. His parents divorced when he was nine, after which he lived with his grandmother before being sent to Rishworth, a private school on the moors at Calderdale, West Yorkshire. After leaving school he joined the RAF as a mechanic, but “spent most of my time reading Hamlet”.
Noakes had a troubled relationship with his father – one of the reasons, he said, that he “hated … that other [sur]name”. Alfie Noakes, a nationally famous musician playing with band leaders such as Ambrose and Geraldo, lived with John’s mother in West Norwood and, as the broadcaster recalled, “would teach me all these funny songs like The Wheel of the Wagon Is Broken”.
In his mid-twenties Noakes took menial jobs to put himself through the acting course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He made his first professional appearance with Cyril Fletcher in a summer show, and spent six months on Broadway in Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything. He was appearing in rep in Surrey in the early Sixties when he met Vicky. (Their son, Mark, would become a landscape gardener.)
Though initially determined to apply his talents to serious drama, Noakes, a highly intelligent man who lacked any sense of arrogance or pretension, swiftly realised that, once installed at Blue Peter, he had found his niche. If a degree of sadness coloured his career, it was inspired by the knowledge that he could have remained in television far longer than he did. As it was, his arguments with Baxter and Barnes escalated, and he gave notice in 1978. At this point Baxter, whose fierce opposition to product endorsement was famous, insisted that Noakes’s collie, Shep, who lived with him, must not appear in commercials.
In Barnes’s words, Noakes (who was then also presenting the travel series Go With Noakes, which also featured Shep) “went berserk” and threatened to punch him. The former Blue Peter presenter made an advert for Spillers with another border collie. After a further row about who should pay for Shep’s food, the dog was rehomed and Noakes retired to Spain in 1982.
The anger and regret over losing his pet on a point of principle never left Noakes. When he had to announce Shep’s death on television, Noakes called him “a super feller”, then broke down in tears.
Noakes spent most of the rest of his life in Majorca, at Port Andratx (occasionally mispronounced by the presenter, who was prone to malapropisms, as “Andrex”, a brand of lavatory paper for which he had voiced commercials after leaving Blue Peter). In Spain he concentrated on his favourite recreations: sailing, painting (he enjoyed creating variations on Hokusai’s wave pictures) and red wine. He became a highly respected tutor, specialising in romance languages, and an expert in the Michel Thomas method of linguistic instruction.
Noakes resurfaced occasionally on British television: in 2003 he hosted an ITV series, Mad About Pets, and in 2008 appeared on an edition of The Weakest Link. In September 2013, with Peter Purves, he took part in Celebrity Pointless.
The comparative brevity of his television career has tended to obscure the degree to which Noakes helped to pioneer a new style of television journalism: intrepid, not over-deferential to authority and unashamedly regional, both in terms of his speech and his interests. Subsequent generations of broadcasters acknowledged his influence.
“People used to say I reminded them of John Noakes,” the broadcaster Andy Kershaw once said. “They meant it as a sneer. I took it as the greatest possible compliment. He was a wonderful broadcaster.”
John Noakes is survived by his wife and son.
John Noakes, born March 6 1934, died May 28 2017