The steady ship

Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue Peter!’ my mother would call out, in a voice that made it clear that my presence was required in front of the television. Blue Peter — 60 years old this week — was top of the very short list of programmes of which my parents approved.

We lived in Woodmansterne Road, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey. You can’t beat that for a Blue Peter-ish address. Our house was mock Tudor; my father worked for the Prudential. My younger sister and I, pupils at modest private day schools, slotted perfectly into the middle-middle-class demographic at which the show seemed to be aimed, though its reach was far wider. And we were lucky enough to watch it during the era of Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and the late John Noakes, whose death from Alzheimer’s last year distressed millions of people. They were, and remain, the holy trinity of Blue Peter presenters.

John was the happy-go-lucky dare-devil Yorkshireman who climbed Nelson’s column without a safety harness. He was famous for telling his border collie to ‘Get down, Shep’ — but for me Shep was an intruder. I still missed his previous dog, Patch, mongrel offspring of Petra. When Patch and the rest of the litter were born in 1965, the Daily Express gave them a double–page spread. Patch’s sudden death in 1971 had to be handled very carefully by the show, so intimately did children identify with Blue Peter. The producers couldn’t get away with secretly substituting another dog, as they did when the original puppy Petra died, after just one enchanting performance.