TV presenter Yvette Fielding, who made her name as the youngest ever host of Blue Peter, has claimed she was bullied while working on the kids’ TV show. The host, who was 18 when she first appeared on the BBC series, says the treatment she received was so bad that if a young presenter was treated similarly today there “would be quite a few implications”.
“I felt very lonely because I was the youngest. I was considered a kid – and a pain in the arse of a kid,” Fielding told the podcast Celebrity Catch-Up: Life After That Thing I Did. “So I didn’t enjoy the first year. I found it very traumatic.”
Fielding claims that she was asked to leave her parents’ home, and was then flown to Russia for six weeks, having only ever been abroad twice before, and that at one point producers even forced her to live with Bonnie, the Blue Peter dog, against her will. She became so unhappy she walked out.
“It got to the point where I’d just had enough. Being made to live with the dog, I had no say in it: ‘You will move out of your flat and you will move into this house with the dog’,” said Fielding.
“Given this dog to look after at 18, and not just a dog – the most famous dog in the country. Poor Bonnie was pining for her owner, scratching at the door every night. It was too upsetting. Imagine how many hearts would be broken if anything had happened to her. It would have been national mourning!”
According to Fielding, she was given no training from the show, despite being an actor rather than a presenter, and was “basically left on my own”. She claims that her poor treatment stemmed from her boss Biddy Baxter.
“I wanted her to be so proud of me, yet it was like being beaten by a parent. Every time I did what I thought was right, she’d come back and say something awful, or berate me in front of other people. It was absolutely soul destroying,” commented the presenter.
“You’ve got to be confident in front of 8 million people twice a week, but my confidence was at an all-time low. I was a shaking, gibbering wreck.”
Once Baxter left the series Fielding claims that her experience of the show fundamentally changed, and she went on to have “an absolute blast” for her remaining four years on the programme. However, despite her unhappiness at the time, she holds no hard feelings.
“The amount of awful people in the television industry … I always thank Biddy because I think, if it wasn’t for her, there’s no way I would’ve stood up, told them where to go and got on with it,” said Fielding. “She did that. She gave me the balls to do that. And I thank her for that. There’s no bitterness there whatsoever.
“But when people say to me, ‘Oh wasn’t it wonderful? Didn’t you have a fabulous time?’ I think, no, not the first year. It was horrific. It was like a nightmare!”
The BBC were contacted for comment.
