It's OK, you can all breathe a sigh of relief. The Blue Peter garden is safe. It's going to live to be vandalised another day. But for a while there it was a close call.
Only yesterday it was claimed that the Blue Peter garden would be ditched and replaced by a virtual garden when the show moves to Manchester in 2011. But now, presumably because someone at the BBC actually saw the phrase virtual garden written down and felt sick, it's been announced that the garden isn't going anywhere. Well, it is. It's going to Manchester. Oh, look, you get the idea. The point is, we've still got our Blue Peter garden and that's exactly how it should be.
The Blue Peter garden is an institution; an example of public service broadcasting at its finest. It was launched in 1974, when editor Biddy Baxter decided that, since fewer and fewer of its viewers had access to a garden, Blue Peter should create a communal garden for all the children in Britain. True, it was a garden they absolutely weren't allowed into in case it upset Percy Thrower, but it was a nice sentiment anyway.
That's why getting rid of the Blue Peter garden would have been a terrible mistake - everything about it is brimming with well-meaning shonkiness, and that's Blue Peter's lifeblood. Yes, burying a time capsule for the year 2000 in the 1970s might have been slightly unnecessary given that the contents were all filmed and everybody knew what it contained before it was even dug up, but good old Blue Peter did it anyway. And, yes, the garden's mural of all the show's former presenters and pets might have made Lesley Judd look like she had rosacea, but that was just another demonstration of Blue Peter's ropey brilliance.
Replacing the Blue Peter garden with a virtual garden would have gone against everything the show stands for. Even when the garden was vandalised in 1983, there was still something endearingly Blue Peterish about it - some healthy, active kids made a plan and worked jolly well together to achieve a common goal. Who'd vandalise a virtual garden? A solitary inert, morbidly obese teenager during a break in a World of Warcraft marathon, that's who. It'd be easy. And that's not the Blue Peter way at all.
The only way that a Blue Peter virtual garden could ever work is if it was powered by a computer made of toilet rolls and yoghurt pots and old shoelaces - and even then it'd set a dangerous precedent. First the Blue Peter garden goes virtual, then the Blue Peter appeal starts raising money for deprived children who've still only got first generation iPhones. The next thing you know the show's being presented by a tortoise in a jetpack and a Terminator Konnie Huq. Is that really what anybody wants?
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