Here's one I made earlier

Twitter/Red Arrows

You'd have thought, as I approach my 51st year, that worn-in cynicism will have hardened the heart to the innocent pleasures of childhood. For the most part that's true. Life will do that to you. And then one day, quite by accident, you encounter something that makes you re-evaluate the things you think are important - mortgages, ageing relatives, job security, and so on - and simply enjoy it for what it is.

So, earlier this year I happened to be working from home one afternoon and, while idly flicking around the TV channels during an interminably dull conference call, came across something that enchanted me, almost to the point of putting a lump in my throat. Yes, that serious. Hitting the instant record button on the remote control, I later played back what had caught my eye: an edition of the venerable BBC children's show Blue Peter in which its 27-year-old presenter Lindsey Russell got to fly with the RAF Red Arrows display team. Inviting television presenters to sit in the back seat of one of the Arrows' Hawk jets has been a common piece of PR for the team, but Russell's report was one of such unbridled, infectious joy that you couldn't help joining in with her experience. Perhaps, now, it's hard to fully express in these words, but I did actually have a 'moment'. Partly it was down to the fact that whenever I see the Red Arrows I get a tiny bit emotional, perhaps inappropriately in a way I should with other more serious things with which I don't. But it was terrific television. Even knowing that Russell is, by background, an actress, it was genuine.

A lot of Blue Peter over the years hasn't always been so genuine. My first scoop as a journalist was tracking down the late John Noakes to a tiny theatre in Palmer's Green in London where he was appearing in panto. "You're not from the Daily Mail, are you?" he'd greeted me with, bitterly, the result of a particularly nasty hack job the newspaper had done on him some months before. In the end, the interview - for my first magazine, LM (resulting in my first ever cover story...) - was a shocking example of never meeting your heroes. Thanks to my dad, who had been a BBC cameraman, I often visited BBC Television Centre in Shepherd's Bush and saw shows like Blue Peter being recorded. In the run-up to Christmas, my dad would be involved in the All Star Record Breakers, a festive special of Roy Castle's show, in which all the then-stars of the BBC's children's output would feature in a big song-and-dance extravaganza. On these occasions, I'd been introduced to Blue Peter presenters of the time, like Lesley Judd and Peter Purves. Noakes - the show's scruffy-haired northerner during my childhood and its longest presenter - turned out to be a very different personality than that with which the Beeb had wanted Blue Peter presenters to be seen as being: "Oaahh - don't get me going about that bloody woman," was Noakes' response when I mentioned Biddy Baxter, Blue Peter's matriarchal editor from 1965 to 1988. Evidently, under her stewardship, Noakes had been sent on most of the dangerous stunts he'd done for the show - like climbing Nelson's Column and diving out of a plane with the Army's Red Devils parachute display team - without any form of insurance, only the goodwill of the BBC and the reputation of Blue Peter as the BBC's acclaimed, wholesome children's magazine to keep him safe.

As you can imagine, it shattered much of the decoration that had been built up around the show. To the 18-year-old me, it was a shocking first realisation that television and the media in general is, to a certain extent, a lot of make-believe. But, bringing it right up to date to the show's 60th anniversary, today, it's quite surprising that Russell got to go up in a Red Arrows jet in the first place. Because what relevance does a show conceived in the Reithian, Enid Blyton middle-classness of 1958 television still have in the age of kids being anything but characters out of The Famous Five?

It is, actually, quite reassuring that Blue Peter is still going, much as it's quite reassuring to discover that the Scout and Guide movements are actually thriving (noting that one former Chief Scout is ex-BP presenter Peter Duncan, and his latest successor is the adventurer Bear Grylls). Cleverly, it has been able to continue to engage children. Even in today's indifferent, too-cool-for-school digital age, the show received more than 100,000 letters last year - up from 40,000 in 2011. People still covet a Blue Peter badge, of which more than a million have been handed out over the show's lifetime, possibly to those desperate for free admission to tourist attractions. Celebrities who've received Blue Peter badges have included Hugh Jackman, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Madonna, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber and Morph. Yes, Tony Hart's plasticine character. Holders of the prestigious gold BP badge include the Queen, Prince William, David Beckham, Usain Bolt, David Attenborough, Tim Peake and Roald Dahl, though presumably none of them are that bothered by free entry to Madam Tussauds.

Over the 60 years there have been shared experiences amongst mine and subsequent generations: I still remember Valerie Singleton taking a lion cub from Chessington Zoo into a local newsagent in Malden Rushett in Surrey, and who can forget Lulu the elephant defecating all over the BP studio in muddy black and white, with Noakes, Purves and Singleton struggling to keep their composure. Animals have always been a BP staple. Yes, there was more than one Shep, Noakes' beloved collie, one of, officially, nine dogs, five tortoises, nine cats and two parrots. And there have been babies - the bizarre feature in which Blue Peter 'adopted' a baby, 14-week-old Daniel, in 1968 with the intention of showing viewers what it was like to have a baby brother or sister. Presenters Tina Heath and Liz Barker both had babies while working on the show, though thankfully not as a live feature, while presenter Janet Ellis would later become eclipsed by the fame of her daughter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who appeared on the show several times as a child.

We remember Anthea Turner doing a "make" of Thunderbirds' Tracy Island, prompting a meltdown as thousands of viewers wrote in for the instruction leaflet, which featured such BBC-friendly generic materials as a "grocery carton", "cereal pack cardboard" and the obligatory washing up liquid bottle. Such "makes" were first conceived in 1962 by a lady called Margaret Parnell, who'd sent in an idea and ended up spending the next 40 years coming up with 700 more, turning the phrase "sticky-backed plastic" into a household staple. Has anyone of my age not made a Blue Peter Advent Crown - a couple of wire coat hangers lashed together with "sticky tape", wrapped in tinsel and with a selection of highly flammable candles at each point to dangle worryingly over the family household insurance policy?

Over 60 years Blue Peter has, actually, done much to support the Reith vision of a "window on the world". Today, in an age when every panel show comedian has done at least one documentary in an exotic location, Blue Peter has the distinction of having brought the world to millions of British children via its annual "summer expeditions", which visited such exotica as Morocco and "Ceylon" as it was still known before Sri Lanka, and now-questionable states like Brunei and Zimbabwe. And where else would you have seen Tonga on national television, unless someone was following a member of the royal family there (let's face it, the only time you hear about Tonga is when a minor royal is on tour). Except for 1986 ("due to budget cuts") and 2011 ("due to the move to Salford"), Blue Peter has provided immeasurable education on the world over its lifetime, of a kind that t'Internet just can't replicate. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to see Russell - the show's 36th presenter - getting to fly with the Arrows. 60 years on, it was so perfectly Blue Peter. "The fact that I get to go lambing one week and literally flying with the Red Arrows the week after makes it the best job in the world," Russell recently enthused. But spare her giddiness - it's the fact that she takes children with her on these adventures that makes it the best job on telly.