They say you should never meet your heroes, and I have to say, there have been occasions when that warning has proven valid. I once encountered Spike Milligan while working as a television publicist but, unfortunately, came up against the darker side of the notoriously bipolar comic, whose genius I’d grown up in awe of, thanks to my dad entertaining us with recordings of The Goon Show.
As a journalist, I often found that private personas were very different to the public versions that I’d seen as a child. My dad worked for the BBC, which meant that I was often taken to Television Centre to see shows he was involved in being made, in the process getting to meet many of their stars. In that context, I was treated as a junior VIP, with presenters and actors in full-on PR mode - gracious and engaging. But, when I later met some of the same people as, now, an adult writer, impenetrable walls of guarded defensiveness would inevitably get thrown up. Fair play: it was easy to see why, the way the tabloids did - and still do - stitch up celebrities, despite them engaging with the press in full understanding of the Faustian pact they had made in exchange for publicity.
Early in my nascent career - in fact, just six months after taking my A-levels - I was dispatched to North London to interview another childhood hero: John Noakes, the slightly scruffy Yorkshire-born actor who inadvertently became children’s television’s resident daredevil during his twelve-and-a-half years as a presenter of Blue Peter.
As my resultant piece for LM magazine detailed in its intro: “He fell from chimneys, dived to the bottom of the sea, raced cars. bikes and steamrollers, climbed Nelson’s Column, stepped out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet, drove steam engines and cars of the future, broke a world record with 102 people aboard a Volkswagen Beetle, built an igloo on the side of the Cairngorms, went on safari all over the world, spent months training guide dogs, hashed up some amazing delicacies in the kitchen, and diced with death on a two-man bobsleigh at St. Moritz. And then he fell from grace - or rather, John Noakes fell out with most of the Blue Peter team”. Well, specifically, Blue Peter’s producers.
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| John Noakes, interviewed by me for LM magazine, March 1987 |
“Why should I risk my life for those idiots, only for them to kick you in the balls in the end?,” he vented at me in the pokey dressing room of the Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green, where he was playing Buttons in Cinderella. “I’ll leave TV to other idiots,” he reflected, some years after leaving the business. That, though, wasn’t the end of his ire towards the show that made his name. “Blue Peter was all one big lie and people believed it,” he revealed, my childhood illusions evaporating into the North London air. For example, the cookery segments, in which he’d confuse “decimated” with “desiccated” coconut was all part of an act. “I couldn’t cook a bloody egg,” he recalled. “The cooking [items] was a load of rubbish. I used to make up those cockups on purpose. It was all one big lie and people believed it. It was fantasy, and you’re all brought up on it.”
Much of Noakes’ anger was directed towards Biddy Baxter, the legendary, matriarchal editor of Blue Peter since 1962, who turned it into a pillar of the BBC’s children’s output. “Don’t talk to me about that bloody woman,” Noakes’ exclaimed that December morning in 1986 when I brought up the subject of his acrimonious departure from Blue Peter in June 1978, having been the show’s longest serving presenter. “The only way they’ll ever change Blue Peter is if they get rid of Baxter. You can take the programme from 15 years ago, stick it on tomorrow and you won’t notice any difference. But don’t ruin my day. I haven’t thought about all that for ages - I think of nice things…”.
Quite what he’d think about things now, with the publication tomorrow of a biography of Baxter herself, we will never know. Noakes died in 2017 at the age of 83, having settled in Majorca after he and his wife Vicky’s sailing yacht was - in perhaps the most Noakes way possible - shipwrecked in 1982, and they decided to stay there.
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| Picture: Ten Acre Films |
When I met Noakes in 1986 there were clearly many points of animosity between him and Baxter. There were industry rumours that he’d been sent on the most dangerous of stunts - like free-falling with the RAF Falcons parachute display team or scaling Nelson’s Column - without any form of insurance, allegedly the result of BBC stinginess. In Marson’s book, however, Vicky Noakes reveals that Shep was the biggest source of acrimony, given that the dog was ‘owned’ by the BBC, with the Noakes family paid an allowance for his expenses. “John used to say, ‘Oh, Shep’s just a prop’. He hated the fact that he should be given a contract to look after the dog. He said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous’.” Noakes also took exception to the BBC preventing him from doing an advert for Spillers dog food featuring the pet.
In reality, Noakes and Shep remained a double act for a long time after Blue Peter, appearing in the children’s factual series Go With Noakes, with the collie continuing to live with the family. But, still, in that Palmers Green dressing room, his anger over many things relating to Baxter - with his love for that dog at its root - was clear. What is also clear is that Baxter, throughout her time as Blue Peter editor (she left the show in 1988 as the result of a reorganisation of the BBC Children’s Television department) was simply protective - perhaps too much - of the Blue Peter ‘brand’. The Spillers ad ban was to prevent the brand being exploited.
During her 33 years in charge, Baxter became a powerful figure within the BBC. “She absolutely ruled [Blue Peter],” Peter Purves once said, adding: “I didn’t always agree with her views, but she was right.” Writing this week in the Daily Telegraph, Marson recounted a story of Baxter needing to make use of the Television Centre inner ring road to demonstrate a new high-tech vehicle. “BBC jobsworths tried to stop her, [so] she simply put in a call to the Controller of BBC One and steamrollered all objections. No matter that as a result there was gridlock around West London. The police were incensed but when they learnt Blue Peter was to blame, took no action.”
Presenter Lesley Judd’s future on the show came into doubt when she divorced her husband Derek Fowlds (then ‘Mr. Derek’ on the BBC’s Basil Brush Show), who in turn threatened to go to the press about their marriage. Baxter was reportedly fearful of the story’s impact on Blue Peter’s wholesome reputation. Judd’s working relationship with the show would never be the same again. “The programme was so precious, especially to Biddy,” Judd has said, graciously. “She ate, slept and lived it.”
Richard Marson is effusive of Baxter’s tenure as the show’s editor, and its lasting effect on a generation or more of children exposed to the show’s sticky-backed plastic ‘makes’. In the Telegraph he wrote: “It was Biddy’s single-minded drive and devotion to the audience that transformed Blue Peter from an inconsequential studio-bound magazine show begun in 1958 and aimed primarily at five to eight-year-olds, to a major national brand, enjoyed, imitated, talked about, mocked, criticised, revered, an essential part of the DNA of generations of children, who watched and engaged in their millions.”
Baxter’s legacy was established by a near-fanatical obsession with what Blue Peter was there to deliver, and by the power that stemmed from her ownership of it. “Presenters came and went but the programme spoke with one voice - Biddy’s,” Marson wrote. “She had the ultimate say over every aspect of the content, wrote or rewrote all the scripts, and was a forensic presence in the studio to ensure that her perspective and emphasis prevailed. Even in an era with far less scrutiny and compliance, she wielded extraordinary power and control. All at a time when it was exceptionally rare for women to reach such positions in television - which Biddy had managed at 29, after stints in schools radio and TV and Listen With Mother.”
To watch Blue Peter now is to see a show largely unrecognisable to that which I watched every Monday and Thursday afternoon as a child, but then so has children’s television. Plus, at 55, I’m not the audience. Today’s Blue Peter has had to adapt to, for a start, children’s television shows being somewhat marginalised in the daytime schedules and shunted into their own channels while BBC One’s afternoons are a dirge of reality shows and quizzes. When I was a child I didn’t have all the digital distractions that kids today have at their finger tips. Frankly, it’s to the BBC’s credit that shows like Blue Peter and Newsround (which my wife screens every day for her primary school class) are still on the air.
Thinking about it though, the era of Noakes, Purves, Singleton and Judd was somewhat unreal. Even for the 1970s, they hardly conformed to what we now think of as youth TV presenters, with Noakes’ ‘slacks’, rolled up shirtsleeves and Boris-esque mop of hair. Youth culture was different, but not necessarily simpler: I’m not, for a minute, suggesting that we had to make do with spinning tops and marbles for our amusement.
Blue Peter was - and probably still is - educational and informative. Under Baxter, we experienced vicariously the presenters’ summer expeditions, to parts of the world television cameras rarely took children. We came to appreciate tortoises’ hibernation rituals, and found that a cheap Christmas decoration could be easily constructed from lashing a couple of wire coat hangers together with some tinsel. Innocent pleasures, that, I must admit, were only slightly bruised by John Noakes’ take on what life really was like behind the scenes.
Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter is published by TenAcre films on 3 July
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