Here’s one they made earlier – whose like we’ll not see again

IT is a frosted Saturday morning in November 1979 and the hall of Glasgow’s Jordanhill College School is heaving with stalls, their attendants and customers in a huge, hastily got up bring-and-buy sale.

A vision in pink, flared corduroy trousers, I buy some books. This event is one of thousands across the land. All are in aid of the people of what is left of Cambodia – lying in rubble after the late, murderous regime of Pol Pot – and at the appeal of a popular children’s programme, whose footage of Cambodian woes has genuinely shocked us.

They hope, by Christmas, to raise £100,000. In fact, they make a cool £3million – and the programme is, of course, Blue Peter, which this week celebrates its 60th birthday. Warm, kindly, very sensible and frightfully British, it is the longest-running children’s television programme in the world.

The theme tune is still the jaunty Barnacle Bill, the blue sailing ship still voyages as its logo and Blue Peter badges are still eagerly sought by children.

The first episode aired on November 16, 1958, and was presented by minor actor Christopher Trace and a recent Miss Great Britain, Leila Williams.

It was stuffy and sexist, though Trace did coin two catchphrases which have adorned our language ever since – ‘Here’s one I made earlier,’ and, to the subsequent delight of Monty Python, ‘And now for something completely different.’

But the somewhat pedestrian programme needed an animating spirit. A force of nature. And in 1963 it acquired it with a new editor, Biddy Baxter.

She would run the show till 1988 and is consulted by those in charge of Blue Peter even today. It was Baxter who came up with practically everything we now associate with the show – the Blue Peter badge, the Blue Peter pets, the Blue Peter garden, the summer expeditions, ‘special assignments’ and the Christmas appeal for some good cause.

Biddy Baxter adored children, instinctively understood them and never forgot her girlhood hurt when she twice wrote to her idol, enid Blyton, and received the same standard reply to both letters.

SHe insisted on a most interactive show, with children exhorted in every episode to write in, and that a card index be kept to ensure each epistle was given a warm, genuine answer.

But Baxter could be abrasive. Presenters still shudder at the memory of her heels coming clackety-clack down the stairs from the director’s gallery, intent on rebuke. ‘This woman controlled our lives,’ Peter Purves has declared, ‘and she didn’t do it very nicely.’

But it was Biddy Baxter who made Blue Peter great and established a format – a brand – that has changed very little in the decades since. (One decree, sadly, did not long survive her: no presenters, on Baxter’s watch, were allowed an autocue, lending the live show a diverting air of danger.)

There is, too, now much more regard for their wellbeing than, say, in 1977, when John Noakes climbed to the top of Nelson’s Column with neither life insurance nor a safety harness. He had a variety of mishaps, from crashing a toboggan on the Cresta run to a Dutch canal swim in cheap trunks that turned transparent when wet.

But the tradition has endured that Blue Peter presenters must trek deserts, run mara- thons, ascend vertiginous heights and throw themselves out of planes. Let us venerate Janet ellis, who in 1984 parachuted free-fall from a Hercules at 12,000ft and broke her pelvis on landing. Not two years later, at Baxter’s insistence, she sky-dived again and set a civilian record.

Blue Peter has been notable for a certain, most British grit. Few forget the Girl Guides who sang stoically on, during the 1970 Christmas special, as the fake studio camp fire they surrounded caught fire for real.

Many rate the chaos wrought by Lulu the baby elephant, in 1969 – the beast refused to leave the set, manured it generously, knocked over her attendant and trod on John Noakes’s foot – as one of the greatest Tv events of all time. It was the more surreal as valerie Singleton continued calmly to lecture us on how our pets should be cared for during our holidays.

The show’s pets are a saga in themselves. Petra the puppy died after her first appearance; Baxter and her junior frantically searched pet shops and dog shelters till they found a ringer. Fred the tortoise turned out to be, um, Freda. Those old enough to remember silver tabbies Jack and Jill recall how they began practically every episode by springing from presenters’ laps and out of shot. Another figure was of great importance – Margaret Parnell, who for almost 40 years devised the ‘makes’, those wonderful things any ten-year-old could rustle up with empty washing up liquid bottles, tissue paper, the tubes from toilet rolls…

Her greatest hour was in 1992, when a BBC repeat of the Sixties Thunderbirds sci-fi puppet series launched a craze for related toys.

NeITHer manufacturers nor shops could meet demand. Then Blue Peter showed us how to make our very own Tracy Island, and from little more than domestic rubbish: the show’s office was soon inundated with requests for the written instructions.

These always sounded slightly strange, given the BBC’s aversion to brand names. Smarties were ‘chocolate button sweets’, Plasticine was ‘modelling clay’ and, most famously, Fablon was ‘stickybacked plastic’.

So dottily mumsy is Blue Peter that it defies parody, though Dawn French had a memorable go in a 1991 episode of Murder Most Horrid. But there is a slightly dark side. Late in Biddy Baxter’s genial despotism, presenters – notably Simon Groom – fought back by feeding sly double entendres into their script.

The show was twice, earlier this century, reprimanded for cheating – a fake phone-in; a rigged vote for naming a cat. Then, of course, there is ‘The Curse of Blue Peter’.

Christopher Trace was in 1968 sacked after a ‘Special Assignment’ to Norway proved too special by half and his furious wife divorced him. Janet ellis has always denied she was dumped after having a baby to a man not her husband, and Michael Sundin’s Blue Peter career did not long survive 1985 snaps of him dancing in his pants with some bloke in a gay bar. He would die, still only 28, of Aids-related illness.

richard Bacon was in 1998 fired when exposed as a cocaine user and the much-loved Caron Keating died tragically young.

Bacon and Singleton are among the very few to have a successful broadcasting career after their years with sticky tape, totalisers and the Advent Crown. But the show did launch one institution: penned by cameraman Michael Bond, Paddington Bear first featured in the Blue Peter annual.

See you next Monday. And remember to wrap up warm, because it’s jolly cold out there…