Download a 50th
anniversary guide to Blue Peter 'makes'
Just for the record, the former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan is not - and
never has been - a porn star. The myth has appeared so many times in print
that the 1975 film in which he featured (The Lifetaker, funded by the
British Film Foundation) was even watched by the woggle wearers at the
Scouting Association before he took on the role as Chief Scout in 2004. Even
The Times has reported him as being a “hardcore porn star”, so he feels a
little nervous around broadsheet journalists, especially with a Blue Peter
birthday coming up and the rumour mill in full grind (Richard Bacon, then a
presenter, was exposed for taking cocaine on the 40th anniversary in 1998).
But Duncan has nothing to fear. The 50th anniversary celebrations are already
under way, with a party planned at the Science Museum tomorrow, a trip to
Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, and, of course, the opening of its very
own exhibition, Here's One We Made Earlier, at the National Media Museum in
Bradford.
Previewing the exhibition with Duncan is like watching a theatre come alive
when the lead actor appears on stage. Within minutes of arriving at the
shiny glass building, he has offered to put on his old green and white
checked suit, exhibited in a glass case, and is bubbling with excitement at
all the Blue Peter memorabilia.
“This suit was designed for me by a child, you know,” he says while buttoning
up the oversized outfit. “They decided I was too scruffy so we had a
competition to design something to smarten me up.”
At 54 Duncan looks as fit as the day he left Blue Peter in 1986, and exudes an
irrepressible boyish enthusiasm. He spots Freda the tortoise (a replica, I
hasten to add) on a table, and picks her up and chats to her as if she were
Yorick's skull. “We used to rush on to the set and nearly tread on her every
week,” he remembers. “Crushing Freda became a running joke.”
Next, while the curator, Claire Thomas, is telling me about how the exhibition
is all about conveying the underlying values of Blue Peter to inform,
educate and entertain, the former presenter is elbowing aside Konnie Huq's
Tracey Island model to shake glitter on to coloured paper. “This is the very
first Christmas card that I made for my audition back in 1979,” Duncan says,
getting out the glue. “It was terrible, God knows how I got the job.”
But, as we all know, the spirit of Blue Peter is not about perfection, or even
doing something well - its about having a go. And that is something Duncan
has never been afraid of. Whether it was fighting a sumo wrestler in Japan,
skiing at 84mph or running the London Marathon in just over three hours, he
has always been daring. His appointment as Chief Scout, the first
appointment of a public figure outside the organisation, was followed by the
number of young people joining the association rising to half a million, and
he personally filmed a group of scouts climbing Mount Everest for his travel
documentary TV series. “I'm clearly a good frontman,” he says. “I'm an actor
and performer with a sense of public duty.”
Right now, the public duty has evaporated in the face of overwhelming
nostalgia. Six television sets and other monitors around the exhibition run
more than 250 clips from Blue Peter episodes from 1962 to the present day.
We are surrounded by the must-have toys of each decade - Chopper bikes for
the Seventies and GameBoys for the Nineties. Duncan points out a picture of
his eldest daughter, Lucy, in the Pets and Babies section. She was adopted
as the Blue Peter baby. “We filmed her first birthday party in this zoo with
a baby chimp and baby gorilla. The gorilla snatched her lolly and Lucy was
filmed crawling across the floor and snatching it right back.”
In the Production area scripts are pinned to the wall, and a detailed floor
plan is laid out with figures of the presenters showing who was to stand
where. More memories tumble out. “What few people realise is how huge the
studio was,” Duncan says. “It was so large that a double-decker bus or
elephant really could be brought on. It was a space where anything could
happen.”
These were the days before autocue, “when crib cards were stuck to the cameras
with sticky-backed plastic. The live action gave it its energy. Occasionally
we tried to record ahead, but it never worked. It needed that moment of
theatre.”
To continue that live drama around Blue Peter's 50th anniversary, Duncan has
been taking himself around the country, performing a one-man show called
Duncan Dares. Should you be brave enough to offer yourself up in the foyer
for a Blue Peter “audition”, he will film you with squeegee bottles, making
a Large Hadron Collider. “It's a slightly bizarre approach, but it's all
about direct contact with people and communicating with them.”
Better than being a porn star? He raises his eyes heavenwards and gives a
pantomime sigh. “I suppose that will stick with me forever,” he says. I
think he quite likes the idea, secretly.
Here's One We Made Earlier is at the National Media Museum, Bradford (0870
7010200) from Oct 18 to Jan 11. Peter Duncan's tour Duncan Dares is at the
Concert Hall, Poole (box office 0844 406 8666) on Friday, Yvonne Arnaud
Theatre, Guildford (01483 440000), Oct 30, Oxford Playhouse (01865 305305),
Nov 7 and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (01723 370541), Nov 14
PETER DUNCAN'S EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Production area: “How the programmes were made. The meticulous details of the
floor plans showed how much care went into getting everything right.”
Appeals: “The list of all the different appeals, split between home and
abroad, was something I had not seen before. And even today the figures of
around £750,000 raised look impressive. Operation Pipeline in 1981, which I
oversaw, gave villagers in Indonesia fresh water and changed thousands of
lives.”
Correspondence: “The producer Biddy Baxter was among the first to invent
interactive TV. She set up a correspondence unit to answer personally every
child's letter, and send out badges for poems and ideas. Most of our
programme items came from those letters.”
