Here’s one I made earlier: the darker side of Blue Peter

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.

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.

Picture: Ten Acre Films

45 years after his departure from Blue Peter - ending the ‘classic’ presenting line-up of Noakes, Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and Lesley Judd - urban myths still linger. One is that Noakes and his beloved on-screen border collie Shep were forced apart by the BBC when the presenter left the show. Noakes had maintained that he’d been told that he’d be able to keep his canine partner, accusing the corporation of breaking its promise. Not so, according to Richard Marson, author of the new book, Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter. In fact, according to Noakes’ wife, he kept Shep until the couple decided to embark on their fateful voyage, concluding that the dog just wouldn’t be happy at sea. And so, Shep went to live with a lady called Edith Menezes, who’d taken on many of the Blue Peter pets after they’d retired from the show.

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.”

Engagement was, Marson argues, key to the show’s strength: “[Children] could write in with a story, a picture, a poem or an idea for the programme. The reward might be one of the famous Blue Peter badges, which Biddy launched in ’63 and which bestowed the privilege of free entry to all kinds of top attractions the length and breadth of the UK. The scheme was wildly popular and, for a one-way medium, kept the show uniquely in touch with the tastes and interests of its audience. In a pre-Internet era, it gave children a powerful sense of ownership and belonging.”

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

My favourite aunt

I owe a great deal to the BBC. My late father worked there for 35 years (that's him, behind the camera). I was brought up in a BBC household, rarely ever watching ITV (remember, kids, there was a time when there were just three - THREE! - channels...) appreciating what the corporation provided the nation and even the world, via its television and radio output. There was also its authority. It’s journalism was beyond question, its presenters peerless. And, best of all, you could watch a film at Christmas without interruption from adverts. As a child, I was able to visit Television Centre often, thanks to my dad. I’ve sat ‘in’ Daleks, been on the Blue Peter set, met the legend that was Brian Cant and still is Johnny Ball, Crackerjack presenters and Roy Castle, and was able to get precious tickets to be in the studio audience of Top Of The Pops. OK, all that was privilege, but they still emboldened my appreciation for the institution that is the BBC.

So, I’m naturally biased towards Auntie. However, within that very nickname lies the reason it, today, comes under attack from every direction like never before. Just look at the last six weeks: politicians from both sides have accused the BBC of editorial bias towards one side or another and, now Boris has landslid into No.10, the murmurings and mutterings have begun again about the sanctity of the TV licence fee, which funds everything from the Beeb’s television output to five of the UK’s 13 symphony orchestras. Paying for a licence is therefore considered to be a contribution to the national cultural fabric.

The inescapable truth, however, is whether this is still relevant. The days when the ever-cheerful Christmas Day episode of EastEnders drew audience figures of more than 20 million - somewhere close to a third of the population - are long gone. Ditto big-budget dramas and variety shows. Even a big draw like the Strictly Come Dancing final this year lost a million viewers from 2018. Thishas nothing to do with the quality of the BBC’s output (as the profoundly anti-Beeb Daily Mail would have you believe) but, simply, the continuing drain on so-called “terrestrial” audiences (an anachronistic phrase given the availability of most terrestrial programming on catch-up services) from other places. Kids, in particular, are just as likely to be consuming television in bite-sized chunks from YouTube, mainlining Jack Whitehall box sets on Netflix, or glued to TikTok*. And with that particular service commissioning ever more ambitious series and co-investing in semi-theatrical films like The Irishman, plus the inroads made by Amazon Prime to original programming of its own, the television landscape has shifted further than I think many people with a traditional view of it realise.
*A teenager reliably informs me

30 years ago I was involved in the last great revolution in British broadcasting, the launch of Sky TV. Then, on 5th February 1989, five new TV channels were added to that landscape on a single day, just seven years after the UK had gone from three to four. Today there are around 460. Something - quite a lot, actually - has to give: if you’re watching Lisa Snowdon’s Jewellery Collection on QVC you won’t be watching Pointless on BBC1. And yet you still need to have a TV licence to watch La Snowdon flogging her sparkly wares. No wonder there have long been Tory murmurings about the licence fee (most recently, the idea of decriminalising non-payment, a thin end of the wedge), but while inevitably some of that will be down to vindictive intent, some will also be the result of free market thinking. The topic of the BBC’s funding comes up periodically, and it is always regarded by noted beard scratchers as an “existential threat”. But with the return of a weaponised Conservative government, empowered like never before and driven by belligerent strategists like Dominic Cummings, that threat is actually, now, looking very real.

Picture: BBC

The argument over the TV licence’s relevance in an age of streamed entertainment is a strong one. I’m relatively happy at paying for one, and between Sir David Attenborough documentaries, Countryfile, Mock The Week, Gavin & Stacey, Rick Stein’s foodie travelogues, Radio 5 Live and my mate Gary Crowley’s shows on Radio London (plus of course, much, much, more), I couldn’t be any happier at effectively paying a subscription fee to the BBC. Given one option in the future, with a licence fee replaced by a pic’n’mix model, I would continue to pay for BBC programming, such is the quality of its output. But with the arrival of Netflix as a producer, not just a rebroadcaster, and Sky planning to invest millions in new original productions at its forthcoming new studio complex in Elstree, programming choice to dilute BBC viewing figures is only going to increase.

Daring to mention the general election just gone, those with an agenda against the BBC have been gifted a fresh grinding wheel for their bilious axes. The accusation of editorial bias is one that I’ll defend any broadcaster from. Generally the rule is that if both left and right are accusing you of political bias, you’re getting it right. The online and even institutional bullying that broadcasters like the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Sky’s Kay Burley received during the election campaign was at times beyond toxic. The far left accused Kuenssberg of being a shill for the Tories, and I’d accept that her comment about postal votes looking “grim” for Labour in a live report was ill-advised. Interestingly, though, both Labour and the Conservatives have had a pop at the BBC’s election coverage, something robustly defended by election night anchor Huw Edwards in a LinkedIn blog post: “You are expected to deliver a results programme which upholds the BBC's reputation for quality and fairness,” he wrote, “but you're doing so in a world where toxic cynicism and accusations of bias (from all sides) are adding to the pressures on the entire team. And you realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades. The apparent purpose, in short, is to cause chaos and confusion.”

Edwards pointed out, validly, that unlike journalists working for certain newspaper and website proprietors (“where regulation is risibly weak and blatant propaganda can be passed off as 'news’”), broadcast journalists are obliged to adhere to strict laws on impartiality. Political interests might not always like that - such as the Tories’ petulant complaint to Ofcom over Channel 4 replacing the absent Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage with melting ice statues during a televised leaders’ debate on climate change - but on balance, the BBC in particular gets it right. Occasionally, it will get it wrong, or appear to do so, such as Kuenssberg’s gaffe and that by political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who referred to Boris Johnson winning “the majority that he so deserves” during a live broadcast. This prompted shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald to say the BBC was partly to blame for Labour’s defeat last Thursday. “I’m very worried about our public service broadcaster,” he told the Today programme on Radio 4. “I’m really worried about the drift. You’ve seen the catalogue of criticisms that [Labour is] making,” adding, “if the BBC are going to hold themselves out as somehow having conducted themselves in an impartial manner, I think they’ve really got to have a look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot to say about this.”

Labour, of course, have other things to consider when it comes to their “period of reflection” on the election defeat and, frankly, the BBC should be the least of their considerations. The Conservatives, too, should lay off the BBC. Their victory had nothing to do with the BBC and, in what was most certainly a clear strategy, in spite of the BBC. I’m as uncomfortable with Boris Johnson evading scrutiny as anyone else, but swerving Andrew Neil in favour of doing selfies with Phil and Holly on This Morning was as belligerent a dismissal of the BBC as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “disappearance” from the election campaign was a deliberate policy. Time will tell whether Johnson’s media performances in the election will come back to haunt him (hiding in a fridge to avoid an ITV reporter is not a good look, and despite his permanent ‘bumbling oaf’ comedy persona - honed on Have I Got News For You - he is as terrible a communicator as his predecessor, Theresa May). The Fourth Estate exists for a reason. The trick is how you engage it. Refusing it is counter-productive.

Picture courtesy of Huw Edwards/LinkedIn/Jeff Overs, BBC

At the weekend Lord Grade - Michael Grade, the former BBC chairman and scion of one of British entertainment’s most influential families - wrote that Neil’s rant-to-camera, goading Boris to come on his leaders' interview show, was petulant. “The situation appears to be bordering on open warfare – in which case I’d advise all concerned to take a step back and remember that it’s normal for governments and independent broadcasters to be at loggerheads.” Grade, writing in the Mail On Sunday, reminded readers that government enmity towards the BBC is nothing new, citing Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell “declaring war” on it over the ‘dodgy dossier’ row, and Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to appoint sympathetic governors to the BBC’s board following alleged negativity towards her over the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. During this election, however, Grade said that the BBC got things wrong. “I’m a huge fan of Mr Neil’s intellectually rigorous style,” he wrote, “and have been for 40 years, ever since I oversaw his selection as an unknown presenter on a London Weekend Television current affairs show. I am not a fan, however, of the way journalists such as Neil hijacked the airwaves, using humiliation tactics in a bid to force the Prime Minister to face their questions. This was a serious abuse of one’s position, and I have written to Ofcom requesting an urgent review to ensure it does not happen again.”

“The issue here is impartiality, and broadcasters have a statutory duty to respect that,” Grade continued. “It is not their job to use the airwaves to cajole and try to coerce politicians into interviews – or to shame them publicly if they exercise their right to refuse. British viewers do not want to see blatantly biased political reporting on mainstream television such as the Americans get with the Right-wing Fox News. But I fear that’s the way we are going.”

Senior Tories are now said to be staying away from Radio 4’s Today, too, ironically now that John Humphrys, and his uncompromising approach to interviewing, has retired. Nick Robinson, one of Today’s presenters, was even president of the Oxford University Conservative Association while a student. But he is still one of the most capable of political interviewers. Avoiding him is not the answer. If I had one criticism of the Tory election campaign (and I’m not going to get into lies and deceit here), it was the flimsy nature of some of the people they put up for broadcast interviews. With Rees-Mogg benched after five minutes of play over his awful Grenfell Tower remarks, the likes of Nicky Morgan and Matt Hancock were deployed, both lightweights. In fact, on one day of media campaigning, Morgan had to be augmented by Hancock. Where were the heavyweights, like Michael Gove and Sajid Javid? (I’d include Dominic Raab here, but he, too, was clearly - and correctly - judged to be too cold and toxic an Alan B’Stard to go anywhere near any broadcast outlet of influence).

But back to the BBC’s future: Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rishi Sunak, has said that the BBC’s funding model is something the government “should look at”, targeting the iPlayer service as one particular area of focus. He has also said there would be wider consideration of licence fee when the BBC’s current Royal Charter ends in December 2027. “The media industry is changing,” Sunak has said. “How people consume media is changing and it’s of course right that we continue to look at those things over time.” For once, I agree with someone from this government, up to a point. That point is where a government - any government - adopts frankly dystopian tones about the BBC. Funding is one thing, but censoring by stealth is something else entirely.

In another piece for the Daily Mail, John Humphrys has also weighed in on the darkening skies gathering over the BBC. “Much more worrying are the threats emanating from Number 10,” he wrote pointing out - as Grade did - that Downing Street leaning on the media is nothing new. “I can't think of a single prime minister in the past half century who would not, at some point in their career, have despatched the BBC director-general to Devil's Island if they'd thought they could get away with it.” But, he ended, senior BBC executives come and go, but the corporation “tends to sail on regardless. When Mr. Johnson raises the question of the licence fee, though, we are entering infinitely more dangerous waters. Make no mistake, this is an existential threat to the BBC.”

In the short term, it is something that the ‘temporary’ Minister for Culture, Digital & Sport, the newly ennobled Nicky Morgan, will no doubt be looking at as she arrives back at the desk she vacated to stand down as an MP at the election. Some on the left will regard any threat to the BBC from this government as karma for the supposed bias during the campaign. But politics aside, by 2027 when the BBC’s charter is renewed, the media landscape will have changed even further. 5G, for example, will have arrived (and even, according to the wonks at my old employer Nokia, 6G), transforming how and, notably, where media is consumed ubiquitously. Even with the BBC’s embrace of online technology, it is still largely a construct of the broadcast industry it invented almost 100 years ago. It is still, though, whether hawks like it or not, a national institution like few others, save for perhaps the Royal Family. It’s motto “nation shall speak peace unto nation”, adopted on 1 January 1927 by the newly formed Corporation to signify its purpose, was a latent symbol of a decaying empire, an empire that itself would come under existential threat 12 years later and the outbreak of war. The BBC’s purpose has clearly shifted since then, and even if people who dress up in red, white and blue to wave flags at royal weddings still see the BBC as a projection of Britain and British values, that function has long since ceased to be relevant. At the end of the day, we should just want Auntie to keep producing the best of British television and radio. We just need to figure out how to pay for it, first.

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.

TV sofas - the politics of the left and the right

In our shallow, insecure times, people place great store in where they sit. It's something which has become increasingly felt at companies operating 'hot desking' policies, where workers no longer sit at the same place automatically, thus preventing desks from filling up with personal photographs, 'amusing' signs about not being mad to work there, and accumulated lunch detritus.

When it first began in - where else? - Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, hot desking wasn't perceived as a sign of disappearing job security. It was embraced as part of the zany, anything-goes, free-yourself-from-convention culture that went with all those skateboarding, surf shorts-wearing offices in California.

"That's my spot"

But when the practice spread to corporate offices in Europe, where notions of employment security have a very different texture, the idea of workers not expecting to have "their spot" each day came as a shock. Not knowing quite what the etiquette was, passive-agressive disputes broke out over computer mice or the adjustment of seat heights. But old habits die slowly, and even in offices with no allocated seating, people generally still plonk where they've always plonked...until some interloper appears to upset the peace.

In television, where you sit is important. In the Sky newsroom some years ago, there was a large and fairly uncompromising Kiwi by the name of Scott Chisholm, who co-presented evening news bulletins. Chisholm had his spot, and few seemed willing or brave enough to challenge it. There was something clearly of the animal kingdom about all this.

And thus it proved when another newsroom alpha, Chris Mann, appeared in that part of the Osterley safari park and had the temerity to use Chisholm's desk, possibly out of provocation. At some point afterwards - I can't now remember the exact chronology - Chisholm and Mann ended up in a clothed version of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed's wrestling match in Women In Love, resulting in Mann taking a trip to the Royal Free Hospital in north London. Trebles and sackings all round.

BBC

Hopefully, then, things won't end up quite so testosterone-fuelled on the set of BBC Breakfast, where the clean-cut vicar's son Dan Walker (he of Football Focus and not working on Sundays on religious grounds fame) has just replaced the retiring Bill Turnbull after 15 years on the famous red couch.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Walker was installed in Turnbull's old spot, on the right-hand side of the sofa - the 'camera left' position as the viewer sees it. This apparently caused viewer Adele Clarke great umbrage, and she wrote to Radio Times to complain that Breakfast producers were being horrendously sexist and that by rights, the longer-standing co-anchor Louise Minchin should now be automatically 'promoted' to the left of frame as the senior presenter.

In few other professions where you sit counts. A judge, obviously. A school headmaster, possibly. On an aircraft, the captain - and therefore commander - always sits in the left-hand seat. That IS a convention of authority. In all these cases, none are a matter of gender, either.

In the case of its flagship breakfast show, however, the BBC maintains that who-sits-where has nothing to do with seniority, but one of aesthetics. Breakfast producers apparently screen-tested Minchin in the camera left position and Walker camera right, but it just didn't work visually. That should be obvious: Walker is 6ft 6in and, as any photographer will tell you, putting that in the middle would just look weird - and if anything, would have made Walker even more prominent.

Chris Evans - a tall bloke himself, and who always sat camera-left to Gabby Roslin on The Big Breakfast - refutes the BBC's visual argument as "absolute tosh", but then I've never seen him sat anywhere else when there's a co-presenter to his side. Photographic composition has to count, even on a news programme, but that clearly hasn't been what this brouhaha has been about.

BBC

What Minchin herself thinks about it all is not fully clear. Tittle-tattle travels fast from wine bar to wine bar in medialand, though, and given the leaky-sieve nature of most newsrooms, it's no surprise that there are murmurings that she was pushing for the perceived prize spot on the Breakfast sofa, but then this is so far unsubstantiated. Frankly, though, until the subject came up in the Radio Times, I don't think anyone had thought less of her sitting to Walker's left, or any more of Walker sitting to her right.

That hasn't stopped a full-on media storm, of the kind only the media likes to create for its own amusement. In today's Guardian, Miriam O'Reilly - who sued the BBC for ageism after she was dropped as presenter of Countryfile - blamed "deep-rooted misogyny" in TV newsrooms for the left-right arrangement and the apparently unspoken rule that the senior presenter always sits on the left-hand side of the screen.

I agree that ageism is endemic in television, but then there are so many 'isms' in the entertainment business as a whole. Whether it's good roles for older women in Hollywood or that Bruce Forsyth was (until his departure) too old to host Strictly Come Dancing, there's always strong argument that such biases exist. The counter argument is always that television, like cinema, is a visual art, and therefore if it looks good, it probably is good. After all, did we ever get wound up by Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and John Noakes sitting in that order on Blue Peter?

TV news journalists, however, do get annoyed by such things. They consider themselves serious journalists rather than light entertainers (though the editorial agenda of Breakfast sometimes says otherwise...). Authority counts perhaps as much as it does for the airline pilot. Positioning Minchin as the lead presenter of Breakfast is no bad thing. Few have raised the fact that Walker is younger than her, which means that she now has what looks like a lanky teenager in his first suit sat next to her. That should indicate seniority to begin with, but in television - as so many aspects of life - perception is nine-tenths of reality. Personally, until Ms. Clarke's letter came up, I - and I suspect most people - probably never gave it any thought. It's just two people on television, with a director, in the case of Breakfast, ensuring that his or her choice of shots is as visually appealing as they are editorially beneficial.

However, what this argument seems to forget is that television is also an aural medium, and none more so than breakfast news when viewers are only paying partial attention to what's on the screen. Who speaks, rather than where they sit is just as important. That's why awkward moments are so commonplace when two TV presenters can't decide who is going to read what on the Autocue. Perhaps, then, the real issue is deciding who gets to say "Good morning, you're watching BBC Breakfast with X and me, Y" than who has a hierarchical superiority based on where they sit.

In America, however, things are less subtle. As Anchorman's Ron Burgundy highlighted so brilliantly there are unbreakable formulas in television news. Visit any US city and watch the local evening bulletins: there will usually be the slightly older, seasoned male hack sat next to the younger, perfectly-coiffed hackette. I've probably never even noticed it, but the convention of man-left, woman-right is no doubt upheld pretty much everywhere. What you then get is the over-excitable "sports" guy to their right and a weather presenter clamped to their left. That is, surely, convention, but also perhaps one of familiarity (much like American supermarkets, whose layouts are always - to me at least - exactly the same).

TV producers are not stupid. In Los Angeles I often used to watch the frankly ridiculous 'zoo' madness of Fox's Good Day LA, a morning news show which seemed focused solely around its venerable anchor Steve Edwards. Either side of him, weather presenter Jillian Barberie and entertainment reporter Dorothy Lucey basically talked over each other. Producers presumably thought this gonzo coffee-and-cacophany format 'wacky'. All the viewer got was a silver-haired news veteran and two screeching blondes engaged in often incomprehensible banter. That's not a sexist comment - it was so obvious what was going on.

Back in the UK, Sky News, like its American cousins in the Murdoch empire, has never been short of criticism that its on-air talent is there more for aesthetic appeal (Adam Boulton not withstanding...) than news credibility. There's no doubt that Sky's presenter roster is blessed with what could be politely termed "visual appeal", but to its credit, there are also some very good journalists who front bulletins. Ever since it launched in 1989, Sky News has mainly operated a two-anchor approach and, yes, often with the male anchor to the left, but not always.

Sky

Sarah-Jane Mee - a very good anchor indeed - currently holds the 'primary' role on Sky News' Sunrise while Eamonn Holmes recovers from hip surgery (notably Gillian Joseph also takes taking the hot seat at weekends). Nobody seems to have an issue with any of these arrangements, and no one makes a big deal out of them - it's simply what works for Sky.

And, at no point has it been suggested that there is any inferiority to the whoever takes the co-presenter seat. That said, Holmes himself only underwent the surgery after putting it off for years fearing that he didn't want to be seen as "old" through television's notoriously youth-obsessed eyes (he's 55). That, back to O'Reilly's comments, is the bigger issue.