Here's one we made earlier PDF

Before its integrity was rocked by a phoney phone-in and a cat named Cookie, before its innocence was besmirched by coke-snorting presenter Richard Bacon, long before it became absorbed into Seventies nostalgic kitsch, Blue Peter set the course of my life. It is uncool to admit this, safer to make glib gags about sticky-backed plastic and “Get down, Shep!”, but as a knowledge-hungry working-class child in a leaden northern town, Blue Peter offered me the world.

A safari in Kenya, training a guide dog, Noakesy on the Cresta run, even those history segments on Marie Curie or Christopher Wren, jazzed up with just a few line drawings… Every moment gripped me. Blue Peter made me long to see and know and do and travel. And the greatest measure of its power is that I watched until the last name rolled off the credits: “Editor Biddy Baxter”.

What other TV producer was ever a household name? Yet who was this Svengali figure, the puppet mistress who operated Val, John and Pete, who for 26 years steered the lives of millions like me? Perhaps only interviewing Enid Blyton would be more exciting to my inner child. And here is Biddy at the door of her gracious mansion flat just behind Broadcasting House, apologising for the clutter. Beside her desk is a towering complete set of Blue Peter annuals – whose covers from the years 1970 to 1975 give me Proustian flashbacks – and on top are screes of letters from children, just a few of the 1,000 a day the programme received, which Biddy has edited into a book, Dear Blue Peter, to coincide with its 50th anniversary this year.

Former presenter Sarah Green says when she first met Biddy in the early Eighties, she expected her to be tweedy, butch, corporate and terrifying. “But here was this tall and elegant creature, with her blonde hair up in a chignon, stiletto heels, a tiny waist, black stockings and huge blue eyes. If you’d asked me what this woman edited I’d have said Vogue or Harpers, not a children’s programme.” And at 74, she is very chic in what looks like Jean Muir – though I’m afraid to make such a trivial enquiry – brisk but solicitous, charming but stubborn, who can talk fluent Blue Peter for hour upon hour without disclosing a single personal detail. I’ve never interviewed anyone so closed about her life. Perhaps this reserve is generational or because she has conducted her career behind the cameras, but I can only agree with a former colleague that she would have made an excellent spy.

Edward Barnes, Blue Peter’s long-time producer (and father of The Times sports writer Simon Barnes), says Biddy’s greatest asset “was an absolutely idyllic childhood and a total recall of that very special time in her life. That seems to have given her a direct line to what an eight-year-old is interested in.” And yet, born in 1933, Baxter’s own Blue Peter years – between the programme’s target ages of six and 12 – were during wartime.

“I got terribly ticked off by an adult viewer once when I said a lot of children enjoyed the war,” she says. “But I did. There were lots of special things you could do. If you were a child, to have a bring and buy sale to buy a Spitfire or send aid to France was terribly exciting. I wasn’t into dolls – I loved teddy bears – so I raffled my rather beautiful doll for the Red Cross and I went, aged eight or nine, all around the streets knocking on people’s doors.” She is still indignant about the resulting story in her local paper. “They wrote that it was my favourite doll, but it wasn’t – I was very glad to see the back of her.”

Suddenly the origin of Blue Peter’s values is luminously clear. Its sense of communal purpose, resourcefulness, thrift – making rather than buying – and its understanding that children can play (indeed long to play) a capable, industrious part in the wider world grew out of this wartime experience. Rosemary Gill, Baxter’s deputy for many years, says the Blue Peter “totaliser”, the studio graphic that lit up to show the progress of a charity appeal, was based on the chart outside her childhood church for the local Spitfire fund.

Biddy Baxter was born in Leicester to a teacher father who, to improve his fortunes, later became director of a sportswear company. Her mother, a housewife, was a talented pianist. Biddy was an only child, which she says made her gregarious, but I would guess – since I am one too – also explains her formidable single-mindedness. She adored the nature journals of Enid Blyton and wrote to the author to tell her so. Delighted by a reply from her heroine, she wrote again, but the second letter she received was identical to the first. So Enid Blyton didn’t care about Biddy after all! This sense of betrayal, the ghastly dawning that the adult world is a sham and deceitful, never left her.

Graduating from Durham in 1955, she was infuriated that the university careers officer offered women only teacher training or secretarial college. To spite him, Baxter applied to the BBC as a radio trainee. Within three years she was producer of Listen with Mother, by 1961 she was making short children’s TV shows and when a vacancy arose for a TV producer she beat older male candidates, including Edward Barnes, who had to swallow his pride and work under her at Blue Peter. “We were amazed she got the job with so little experience,” says Barnes. “But it quickly became apparent why they chose her. She had this huge enthusiasm and drive. Nothing was too good for children. Anyone who got in the way of the best children’s programme in the world – which is how she thought of Blue Peter – was making a big mistake. She always got what she wanted.”

Blue Peter, which had begun three years previously, was then a relatively modest low-budget weekly programme. But Baxter’s ambition for it was boundless. She began demanding the best studio, the most able camera crews. Dazed bureaucrats found it easier to give in than endure the earache.

And recalling the disappointment of Enid Blyton’s stock letter, she decided Blue Peter should have a correspondence unit. Children would always receive individual replies, their names stored on index cards, so if they wrote again, the letter could, for example, enquire about a pet or little brother they’d mentioned before. And to encourage children to write in, she invented the Blue Peter badge, an honour awarded for a great drawing or a smart idea.

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