Better days: Peter Purves, Valerie Singleton and John Noakes Photo: Luke Finn
Blue Peter celebrated its 65th anniversary on Monday — Another candle on the cake for the world's longest-running children's television show. However, instead of a celebration made of plastic, the event passed in a fog.
Following the departure of three presenters in just 14 months, insiders this week described the establishment as a «very unhappy, sinking ship» and Yvette Fielding, the show's youngest presenter when she joined the show aged 18 in 1987, spoke of a «traumatic » period that included being forced to live with the show's then-favorite, golden retriever Bonnie, «the most famous dog in the country,» against her will. All of them dealt a significant blow to the cheerful image of good and clean entertainment for children, which has been served on a homespun platter for almost seven decades.
The BBC has denied this wave of criticism, calling the show a «bright» future that it has «absolutely no plans to stop». The spokesman added that auditions are currently underway to replace Mwaxi Mudenda, Blue Peter's 39th presenter, who quit last month after just two years, leaving a duo rather than a trio to take over the show for the first time since 1965.
< p>The controversy has once again exposed cracks in Blue Peter's once unblemished appeal among 8-12 year olds. Views, which peaked at eight million, stood at 37,000 last week; its DIY segments, an orgy of repurposed egg cartons and Fairy Liquid bottles, cannot dominate the cultural conversation in a world of screens and entertainment centers offering every content imaginable on demand.The rush to get a Blue Peter badge, or collect its annual awards, or request a newsletter for a «product» — like the 100,000 people who wanted to copy Anthea Turner's recreation of the sold-out Tracy Island Thunderbirds toy — are moments from a bygone era. . The misadventures of Shep, or the lost cats Jack and Jill, are no longer pre-booked viewing in an age when 98 per cent of children aged 7-16 watch TV on demand, and almost three times as many people watch YouTube as the BBC.
Janet Ellis with baby Bonnie in 1999 Photo: Luke Finn
Blue Peter's audience in 2023 «represents a very strong snapshot of how viewing has changed for children over the age of seven,» explains Greg Childs, director of the Children's Media Foundation, which helped launch CBBC in 2001. Reaching children “is getting harder and harder.”
Childs entered children's programming through Record Breakers — the Blue Peter spin-off he worked on for ten years from 1988 — which then, along with its predecessor, could «easily» attract six million viewers on a Friday afternoon . . By the end of the next decade, with the advent of multi-channel television, including competitors such as Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network, this number had fallen to 500–600,000. In 2017, a rerun of Blue Peter attracted no live viewers.
“This shift is really significant,” Childs says. Its retreat from the center of on-screen social life to the periphery has been large, but perhaps inevitable, given that «there are now over 8,000 solo children's shows in the UK,» explains Cyrin Amor, senior research fellow at consumer research firm Ampere. Analysis.
Along with the binge-watching box set culture decimating linear viewing, budget cuts also played a role. An Ofcom Media Nations report says investment in children's programming is at its lowest level in a decade, with real money falling from £114m in 2013 to £80m last year — partly due to a ban on junk food advertising , introduced in 2006 (resulting in less external money coming in), and the £44m Young Audiences Content Fund, set up to support children's television on channels such as ITV and Channel 5, which the government abandoned last year .
Today's commissioning trends have also changed. Bizarre exchanges in which zookeepers slide through elephant dung or colorful fundraising thermometers fill the screen are eliminated, and instead shows «based on pre-existing intellectual property, or spin-offs of shows, [or] adaptations of books» (or video games) ) these are just prerequisites and are seen as creating a proven fan base that will support the channels in the battle for ratings.
The side effect of this fragmentation is visible not only among Blue Peter's audience, but also among its presenters. Gone are the days when double figures beat the likes of John Noakes — the series' longest-serving performer at 12 years — or Connie Hook or Valerie Singleton, both of whom led the series for ten years.
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The show that launched countless television careers for the likes of Matt Roberts, Simon Thomas, Richard Bacon, Gethin Jones , Tim Vincent, Katie Hill and many others, now seems to reflect the same limited attention span as his viewers: Mudenda, Richie Driss and many others. Adam Beals (both retired last year) served there for two to four years.
(For comparison, among the eight on-screen presenters in Blue Peter's first two decades, two lasted less than four years, and the rest between six and 12.) Although Beales' status as a YouTuber probably seemed like a smart bet for BBC executives hoping to retain relevance of the show, today's hosts know the value of quickly changing the channel.
This decline in loyalty across the board led to a number of calls for its closure: first in 2011 when it was dropped from BBC One at CBBC and sent to Media City in Salford, and then again in 2017 when this episode aired with zero spectators. CBBC will be phased out as a linear viewing service in 2025 as part of the BBC's cuts and move to a digital model.
Current Blue Peter presenters celebrating the program's 65th anniversary. Photo: PA
Today's disparate viewing environment doesn't make shows like Blue Peter obsolete, Childs urges. “Kids need this more than ever. They need to draw on the lives that happen at the end of their journey and the stories that can be told by people like them about people like them.” “It's very important that we support this,” he adds, “because if we stop showing the children themselves and the society in which they live, what happens to their connection to that society? So Blue Peter must continue to work.”
While some of Blue Peter's recently departed presenters have declined to comment, Janet Ellis, who hosted the show from 1983-1987, agrees that while viewing habits have changed, children have not. Ellis says the role the show plays for today's 8- to 12-year-olds is «really the same» as it has always been. “Now we tend to think that childhood is shorter than ever and not as good as it was, [that] we had more freedom. But if you meet the children, they are still optimistic and positive… forgive me if this sounds a little elegant, but I think [Blue Peter] just gives a picture of a world that is worth growing up in.»
However, Ellis has no illusions about the opportunities children have now. With five grandchildren — with whom she says she «doesn't discuss» any potential Blue Peter viewing habits — it is «simply impossible» to reach the viewership numbers of its heyday. Despite the low numbers, the fact that it continues to be shown on television is proof that after all these years, «somewhere, some kid wants to know what happens after the theme song.»
However less so, with full digitization looming on the horizon, how could Blue Peter prevent it from reaching relic status? Childs believes the next step in preserving the legacy is to “find a way for its fantastic, wonderful, life-enhancing content to reach audiences in new ways. Perhaps it is no longer a program, but a brand, a concept, an idea, and that its various component parts can be found separately in the universe upon request.
As with many legacy institutions, there appears to be options: adapt or die. «It would have been a brave person to take it off the air, that's for sure,» Ellis says. What about the future of Blue Peter? «I'm not sure anything should stay there forever.»
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