The Golden/Goldie Years (UPDATED VERSION) (Blue Peter)

Member Name: W Shakespeare

Product:	Blue Peter
Date:	15/08/01 (2292 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great role models for labradors

Disadvantages: Pregnant Mums need not apply

Goldie, Simon Groom and Musical Youth. These are the things of which dreams are made – nightmares, in fact.

Today’s ‘Blue Peter’ has the safe, youthful boy/girl band appeal which television executives are increasingly loathe to stray from. In fact, it is no coincidence that the programme once followed the career of pop band STEPS so closely, when so many of its presenters appear to have been cloned from the mutated DNA of H and the blonde one with the big jaw from S Club 7.

However, anyone aged over 30 knows that before this particular butterfly emerged, there was one ugly, hairy caterpillar which preceded it – the 1980’s (or ‘the Golden Years’ as BBC Choice will no doubt call them when they repeat BP in twenty years’ time.)

A single opinion cannot seriously do the great show any justice, so I have selected some of the top ten memories and moments from the Golden Years. A time when you didn’t need to have large breasts or great pecs to present children’s television - just a dog and a bad haircut.

1) The Blue Peter Garden – Blue Peter’s garden was no ordinary garden. It was a ‘sunken garden’. But it seemed as though it was well and truly sunk when some mindless vandals desecrated what was a holy shrine to Percy Thrower (a grumpy old fart who did the odd bit of gardening and no doubt hated anyone, and I mean ANYONE, so much as sniffing his begonias). I can still remember the sense of righteous indignation with which Janet Ellis, or whoever, announced the news to the nation. As if civil war had just broken out in Switzerland for Chrissake.

2) The Blue Peter Badge – All winners and runners-up in competitions were awarded a rather unspectacular circular badge with the BP emblem on it. Badge winners were supposedly let into a whole range of rather tedious and pointless museums for free. As a badge winner, my family tried this once and after a lot of grief from the car park attendant, I got in for free. All that hassle, and I stayed in the car in the end. Top achievers got a fancy gold BP badge. This wasn’t as good, as I don’t think it gave you free entry to anywhere, other than A&E if you showed it to anyone in a particularly rough housing estate.

3) The Appeal – Take the contents of your mother’s jewellery box and get £5 for it at a Bring and Buy sale, then send it to BP so they can put it towards a good cause in a foreign land, like buying beach towels for elderly German tourists. Each year the show had a different ‘totalisor’ which looked as if it had been made from loo rolls and sticky-backed plastic. This lit up when specific targets were met, but you knew they turned the lights off when they weren’t on air.

4) The Blue Peter Expedition – The presenters always got to go to some God-forsaken place during their summer break, and would always try and build a water pump for the locals in Third World countries, like France. We only got to see the boring bits. Simon Groom’s trip to Thailand dressed as a Lady Boy was never shown.

5) The Pets – Labradors (Goldie, Bonny) and sheepdogs (Petra, Shep) were severely overepresented on BP, which was rather unfortunate for other breeds such as poodles and jack russells who never seemed to get past the audition stages. Shep was the most famous, who had a worryingly close relationship with owner John Noakes. There was a tortoise who was packed off in a cardboard box every winter, but no-one really cared if he was still alive in spring, because he never did much. The cats always jumped off the presenters’ laps as they were about to introduce an item and they all got cakes made from pet food on their birthdays…which was nice.

6) "Here’s one I made earlier" – A phrase which has become part of television folklore. Time constraints meant that the full 7 hour horror of creating that awful advent candle wreath-thingy was condensed into five chaotic minutes. The same concept applied for recipes, with everyone forced to grin and say "Mmmm, tastes great" when they’d quite obviously rather be tucking into Goldie’s pedigree chum birthday cake.

7) Musical Youth – The band that brought us "Pass de dutchy ‘pan the left han’ side" – what the hell did that mean? You’ll be interested to know that MY were dropped as the regular musical visitors when their drummer was convicted of cannabis possession. So THAT’s what a dutchy was.

8) XXX Peter Duncan – Hmmm, now there was a character. Mysteriously dropped from BP when it was discovered he’d appeared in a porn movie, this didn’t stop Biddy Baxter from rehiring him some time after, possibly after he’d ‘auditioned’ for her once again. Often sported a rather ghastly green and white checked suit which one particularly psychotic viewer had designed for him and was a perfect counterbalance to the rather nerdy Simon Groom. Janet Ellis probably had fantasies about him.

9) Janet Ellis’ Sacking – God forbid, a BP presenter had sex with a man and got pregnant, BEFORE SHE WAS MARRIED. Can you imagine? I’m shaking just typing it. Naturally, Ms Ellis got the boot, and her daughter grew up to be – chart-topper Sophie Ellis-Bextor. (You know, the one who looks like a china doll.) She had a very annoying squeaky voice any way, so we were all glad to get rid of her.

10) The Time Capsule – Every once in a while, our team would bury a collection of obscure items in a time capsule for future generations to discover e.g. Simon Groom's corduroy trousers or Biddy Baxter's bloomers. Why anyone would need to dig up an old box in the future when they’ll have 50 million hours of ‘Simon Schama’s History of Britain’ to trawl through, I don’t know. But then, I don’t think Simon Schama ever covered how to make an action man training tower from an old hoover and 10 yards of knicker eleastic.

It was always there, twice a week, as regular as clockwork, just after John Craven’s Newsround. We may mock it now, indeed we mocked it then, but it engendered a curious sense of community as playgrounds buzzed with news of Joey Deacon’s latest wheelchair.

It was, truly, the mother of all children’s programmes in the 1980's.

UPDATE - FOUR YEARS ON

Blue Peter has shrugged off it's old-fashioned image and gone and got itself a website. What you can't see is the double-sided sticky tape holding together the 1960's server.

If you visit the site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/bluepeter

you can see the presenters' profiles; Konnie, Matt, Liz, Zoe and Gethin.

The photos are rather risque. In fact, it looks like Gethin has just pulled down Zoe's jeans and is hiding her belt behind his back. According to the website, Zoe's from Bangor and Gethin likes bananas covered in custard. Maybe that explains it. Hang on, she's also a qualified solicitor, so I'd better shut up in case she specialises in defamation.

In fact, all the girls are wearing dangerously low-slung hipsters. (Takes deep breath and composes himself.) There is also a lady called Konnie Huq, which sounds like a tropical disease. "Hello doctor, my huq's giving me a bit of trouble." "Don't worry, it's just gone a bit konnie. Probably those tight hipsters your wearing."

Then there's Matt, who spent a lot of time with sheep when he was younger. I'm not surprised if he goes around wearing such awful stripy shirts. The sheep probably thought he was a cattle grid.

There's plenty of other stuff on the website but I'm damned if I'm going to be bothered trawling through it. Oh alright, I'll randomly click on something - 'Games'. "Help the presenters Escape From Castle Doom..." Thanks, but I think I'll leave them there for now....

Summary: Here's an opinion I wrote earlier (four years ago in fact) and have updated.