Inspiring news! The BBC is to digitise all 5,000 episodes of Blue Peter to celebrate the children’s show’s 60th anniversary next month. What this means is that, finally, I can get closure, if not a Blue Peter badge.
I’ll be able to find that episode in which someone, possibly presenter Lesley Judd, encouraged me to make a brush from a bent wire coat hanger and two balls of wool, one yellow, the other blue. I took one yellow thread in my left hand, a blue one in my right and wound them around the bent coat hanger in maypole fashion. When I finished I was supposed to have made a brush.
One Christmas, I gave it to my mother, possibly adding the Blue Peter catchphrase: “Here’s one I made earlier”. She smiled thinly and, you’d think, later unwound the wool and unbent the coat hanger. Worst Present Ever. Clearly I missed some vital step in the instructions. Now, happily, I’ll be able to go back in time and get it right, and thereby erase a crime from my cranial database – like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
I’ll be able to do more. I’ll be able to bring Shep the sheepdog back to life. I’ll be able to closely study the face of Val Singleton to confirm my hypothesis that, as future presenter of The Money Programme, she thought she was above sharing the sofa with lower life forms like John Noakes and Shep. I will be able to download that episode in which presenter Anthea Turner made a cave out of cake in which to place a model Thunderbird 2. Play and rewind again and again until I can make a cake-cave as good as hers. By the time I finally place Virgil’s aircraft in the green-dyed, successfully risen and hollowed-out cave-sponge, in what will be in no way a phallic gesture, I’ll probably be eligible for a Freedom Pass.
Alternatively, if these are the best ways I can imagine spending my dotage, I’d do better to lock myself in a room with a loaded Beretta and do the decent thing.
Don’t we digitise too much? Shouldn’t we erase more? Hasn’t Lulu the elephant, who disgraced herself by going what art critics call “Chris Ofili” on the Blue Peter studio floor, suffered enough in having her image rights thus sullied? Doesn’t she deserve the right to be forgotten in accordance with EU rules? Imagine Lulu’s kids, stumbling across an old Blue Peter and seeing their mum defecating on the studio floor, and imagine their pain intensified by Noakes’ rueful complaint: “Oh dear – I’ve trod right in it!”. Don’t Lulu’s children have the right to be protected from such sights too?
The elephant in the room, you see, is nostalgia. Those grave-robbing ads in which Judy Garland is made to endorse Halifax financial products, where Top Cat is repurposed to flog ISAs and the whole panoply of long-dead popular cultural icons is submitted to necrophilia to get middle-aged boneheads like me to buy stuff.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, once explained to me that, since humanity’s early days, we have devised ways of holding on to our memories. Yet through millennia, forgetting has remained marginally cheaper than remembering.
No longer. Because of the digital revolution it’s easier and cheaper to keep everything. That revolution changes our souls. No more the involuntary memory that gave Proust a rush when he ate a madeleine and recovered his childhood; instead, we can trawl through our digitised pasts purposefully rather than doing what we should do - consign the past to oblivion.
True, social historians may well study 60 years’ worth of Blue Peter to note changes in social mores. The moment male presenters stopped wearing ties. The day in 1990 (how late it was, how late!) when Diane-Louise Jordan became Blue Peter’s first black presenter. The episode in which Noakes bared his bruised bottom after coming off his bobsleigh as he shot down the Cresta Run. Do kids’ TV presenters bare their bottoms any more? You’d think there are rules about that kind of thing.
One reason Blue Peter has endured where other shows have folded(remember its bitter rival Magpie? Me neither) is that it has remained true to creator Biddy Baxter’s founding ethos. “It’s still got that same structure and definitely the same values; it’s about the badge, about being brave, going outside your comfort zone, going for it and believing in yourself and taking on an adventure – all of that’s still there,” explained the current presenter Lindsey Russell this week. Whether there’s 60 more years in this format, as she and co-presenter Radzi Chinyanganya suggest, is a moot point
If Russell’s right, Blue Peter is a paradox: its values encourage viewers to do stuff other than watch screens. For that reason, Blue Peter deserves to be celebrated as a 60-year-old corrective to our age. To earn a Blue Peter badge, after all, you have to do more than lie on the sofa filling your face with cheese puffs.
Another show from my childhood, Why Don’t You (Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead)?, was explicit about this. Perhaps then what I can learn ultimately from Blue Peter is to turn it off. And more than that, disengage from the digital world for the sake of my soul. Well, maybe. Now, where did I put those balls of wool?
• Stuart Jeffries is a feature writer
