Biddy Baxter's Blue Peter and the end of a common culture

Spectator

5 hours ago

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.