When it comes to kids’ TV, the past is truly a foreign country
Konnie Huq is the eternal Blue Peter presenter. She left the children’s show nearly 15 years ago, but she’s still bursting with its optimistic values.
Earlier this month, i interviewed her about her retrospective of BBC children’s telly, Kids’ TV: The Surprising Story (BBC1). Konnie believes fervently that, by teaching toddlers and schoolchildren ‘empathy in liberal doses’, we can heal the world through television.
‘If every child was given love and all the right values,’ she said, ‘we are going to have a generation of future adults who will solve all the ills of society.’
It’s a lovely idea and Konnie is a sincere, kind person. But as i watched her show again, i saw quite a different message — about how quickly our former days slip into the past.
In black-and-white Blue Peter clips, Val Singleton was walking a lion on a lead. Johnny Ball, the effervescent presenter of Think of A number, was dressed as the devil in a fiery hell — and kept capering, even when his tail caught light.
‘That could never happen now,’ Konnie told me. ‘Some of it looks so dangerous — i get goosebumps when i watch John noakes climbing
Nelson’s Column [in 1977] without a safety harness or even a hard hat.’
Compare that reckless derring-do with the health- and- safety obsessions of today. Last weekend’s Doctor Who was even criticised for a scene in which the Tardis was perched on a Dorset clifftop, the landmark Durdle Door. Apparently this scenic moment might encourage fans to climb the rocks. Well, you can’t be too careful.
The children’s clothes and hairstyles were charmingly dated in Konnie’s documentary, of course, but other details illustrated how distant the recent past really is.
noel edmonds’s Saturday morning phone-in show, Multi-Coloured Swap Show, was launched in 1976 after someone at the Beeb read that more than half of British homes had installed a landline. Put that another way: nearly half the population still had to go to a phonebox when they wanted to make a call.
Two years later, the junior soap Grange Hill began. At the time it was billed as a gritty slice of life in a rough comprehensive school. Seen today, the pupils are enthusiastic drama school students having a jolly good time acting tough.
‘From its earliest days,’ Konnie’s voiceover earnestly claimed, ‘children’s TV challenged convention.’ Though i enjoyed every minute of this nostalgic hour, i think the reality was quite different. However much the Beeb tries to shape each young generation, they’ll grow up to be something else entirely.
naturalist iolo Williams had his eyes on new generations as he watched ravens and cormorants nesting in north Wales. There were lapwings, too, in Iolo’s Anglesey (BBC2). ‘ The chicks are quite comical,’ he said. ‘They look like little wind-up toys.’
Lapwing numbers have plunged in recent decades, he said — another reminder of the retreating past. i often used to see lapwing flocks, but haven’t for many years. The most spectacular shot, filmed in the island’s Cors Ddyga wetlands, captured a ‘ food transfer’ between marsh harriers in flight. The male let go of a vole in its talons, for the female to catch in mid-air, like trapeze artists.
This captivating half-hour also showed us adders in the undergrowth beside a disused railway track, and a stoat lolloping along a path — ‘like a long sausage with legs,’ said iolo.
The only niggle was that this glimpse of springtime in Anglesey is airing in october. Later in the evening, iolo joined Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham for Autumnwatch. it seemed oddly incongruous.