My mum worked with Biddy Baxter. Both women were formidable – and absolutely terrifying

The Guardian

4 days ago

David Attenborough's description of Biddy Baxter, when he presented her in 2013 with a special Bafta for her 25 years' work on Blue Peter, was easily the best: dedicated, passionate and pioneering. But since the producer has died, at 92, and other reminiscences have poured in, you can't help but notice how many of them are synonyms for 'scary'.
'Producer' and 'creator' describe Baxter's work on Blue Peter, but don't convey how totally and utterly everything was her idea: from Tony Hart to the Blue Peter badges, from the golden retrievers to the Blue Peter garden, from 'here's one we made earlier' to the charity appeals, she conjured it all, to make a cultural artefact that left no child untouched. If you ever received a Blue Peter badge, it's odds on you still have it – and, if it's a gold one, that you still talk about it.
My mum worked on Blue Peter as a set designer, on and off, over the same period and was always using words such as 'formidable', 'uncompromising' and 'takes no prisoners' about Baxter. It made no sense to me as a kid, because my mum was terrifying at work. She revelled in how scary she was, how she could make fully grown carpenters quake with one eyebrow. How could there be two of them? Surely that would cause some kind of chemical reaction? Also, my mum didn't prize the 'feminine' traits of amiability and compliance, so why did she sound faintly critical when they were void in other women?
They were different brands of scary: Baxter was stilettos-on-the-studio-floor scary; my mum was dungarees-and-cigs scary. Baxter kept presenters in their place by insisting the real stars were the Blue Peter pets, while the entire design department (if memory serves) acted like neither pets nor people held any meaning at all, compared with a scale model of an aquarium made of balsa wood and sticky-back plastic.
But still, you would have expected maybe a trace of solidarity, a collective 'in fact, neither of us is frightening in any true sense, we're just professionals with strong views who happen to be women'. I didn't see any of that, which speaks to Attenborough's point about pioneers: if you're ever wearing stilettos at work and telling people what to do without striking terror into anyone, it's because Baxter and her ilk, from the 60s through the 80s, were the ones they made earlier.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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