Millions of children watched Blue Peter. Biddy Baxter brought us together as a country
In the heyday of terrestrial television, from the 1950s to early 1980s, so many people watched the same things. There were only two channels until 1964, only three until 1982. This created a community of amusement, gossip and shared knowledge.
Today's news of the death of Biddy Baxter brought this home to me. She must have been the only example of a television editor, as opposed to presenter, who was a household word. Children watching never knew what she looked like, but her memorably alliterative name always appeared last on the credits at the end of Blue Peter. We all, in our millions, watched Blue Peter.
I can attest to Biddy Baxter's fame by the fact that my wife, being born Baxter (though no relation), was often jokingly called Biddy at university in the 1970s. I occasionally call her 'Biddy B' as a tease even now.
Unlike all but a tiny percentage of children, I met Biddy Baxter. This was because we had a litter of nine husky puppies – the second, I believe, ever born in Britain. Their mother was called BP, which stood for Big Puppy, not Blue Peter. They made the H in the Blue Peter Dogs' Alphabet – and the whole lot appeared on the programme.
The Moore family brought them up from the country to Broadcasting House. Miss Baxter as, of course, we called her, greeted us. She had high, clicking heels and a brisk manner. I must admit I found her slightly alarming.
While we sat drawing in a make-up room (there was no live 'feed' in those days), the puppies tumbled around in the studio with Christopher Trace and a slightly uneasy Valerie Singleton. Rather shockingly, they referred to them throughout as 'Antarctic' creatures: they are Arctic ones.
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The Guardian
11 hours ago
- The Guardian
My mum worked with Biddy Baxter. Both women were formidable – and absolutely terrifying
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 Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Spectator
14 hours ago
- Spectator
Biddy Baxter's Blue Peter and the end of a common culture
I haven't written a poem in memory of Biddy Baxter, stern matriarch of Blue Peter, who died yesterday but here is one I made earlier. First, a brief thought on the programme that she edited from 1962-1988. On one level, it was just a magazine show for children – a bit of chat, a few guests, a craft section (famous for its use of 'sticky-back plastic', as they weren't allowed to say Sellotape, and the phrase 'here's one I made earlier'). But on another level it was our virtual community, our virtual school, our first taste of national culture. It is hard to express this thought, because it sounds like nostalgia for something fairly mundane, but the BBC used to create common culture in Britain. Or so it seemed. And in a way, children were more receptive to this than adults. For we believed in what we were shown. Our parents understood that British culture had all sorts of divisions that the BBC papered over, and that the entertainment industry was all a bit dubious to some extent. We didn't. We trusted it all. And so the BBC seemed like a big official family, full of friendly interesting uncles and aunts. Blue Peter embodied this: it spoke to us in family tones – encouraging, consoling, warning, even chiding. Its presenters resembled the nice but slightly stern adults we encountered at school or elsewhere. There was unashamed idealism, moralism. This morally confident tone disappeared from children's television in the 1990s: Blue Peter dropped the urge to educate and enrich, which now seemed bossy, and became dominated by a pop-music ethos, a chasing of celebrity guests. In Baxter's day, pop music was only sparingly aired. She decided against having Paul McCartney on the show. What a huge and victorious decision. So here is my little poem. It concerns an incident that will be very familiar, in a semi-ironic traumatic way, to people of my generation. In 1983 the Blue Peter Garden, tended by a nice old codger called Percy Thrower, was vandalised. I wrote it nine years later, at university, when I was rather weighed down by big thoughts about the demise of common culture and shared meaning. It was published in a slightly pretentious campus literary magazine – which is so far the only publisher of my poetry.
Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Telegraph
Millions of children watched Blue Peter. Biddy Baxter brought us together as a country
When television first became all-powerful, people complained that it dissolved social bonds, but you could argue the opposite was true. In the heyday of terrestrial television, from the 1950s to early 1980s, so many people watched the same things. There were only two channels until 1964, only three until 1982. This created a community of amusement, gossip and shared knowledge. Today's news of the death of Biddy Baxter brought this home to me. She must have been the only example of a television editor, as opposed to presenter, who was a household word. Children watching never knew what she looked like, but her memorably alliterative name always appeared last on the credits at the end of Blue Peter. We all, in our millions, watched Blue Peter. I can attest to Biddy Baxter's fame by the fact that my wife, being born Baxter (though no relation), was often jokingly called Biddy at university in the 1970s. I occasionally call her 'Biddy B' as a tease even now. Unlike all but a tiny percentage of children, I met Biddy Baxter. This was because we had a litter of nine husky puppies – the second, I believe, ever born in Britain. Their mother was called BP, which stood for Big Puppy, not Blue Peter. They made the H in the Blue Peter Dogs' Alphabet – and the whole lot appeared on the programme. The Moore family brought them up from the country to Broadcasting House. Miss Baxter as, of course, we called her, greeted us. She had high, clicking heels and a brisk manner. I must admit I found her slightly alarming. While we sat drawing in a make-up room (there was no live 'feed' in those days), the puppies tumbled around in the studio with Christopher Trace and a slightly uneasy Valerie Singleton. Rather shockingly, they referred to them throughout as 'Antarctic' creatures: they are Arctic ones.
