blue peter reaction

Blue Peter was a hole in my knowledge of British culture. I’d lived in the UK for years, but I hadn’t watched it as a child in Canada, I didn’t have children watching it here and I wasn’t watching it as an adult. People in my community mentioned it, and I had almost no reference for what they meant.

A viewer called Popcorn sent me a book, Here’s One I Made Earlier: Classic Blue Peter Makes. Receiving it made me realise I didn’t actually know what the show was. In 2023, I watched a selection of old clips to find out. My first guess was that it would be something like Art Attack, which I’d loved as a kid. That guess didn’t last very long.

The opening titles didn’t clear things up

I started with a compilation of opening themes, hoping they would explain the programme. Instead, I found cats, a ship, a bicycle, Tower Bridge, someone climbing a pole and fireworks. I kept changing my mind. Was it an art show? An engineering show? I couldn’t make the different images fit into the kind of children’s programme I was imagining.

A brief segment about the grass at Wembley Stadium made me wonder whether it was more like news for children. The nearest comparison I could think of was Popular Mechanics for Kids, a show I’d loved that explained science and a bit of everything. I remembered a particularly interesting segment about magicians. That was still a guess, but it seemed closer than Art Attack.

The clock-tower clip was hard to watch

One old segment followed sidecar racing. It looked much more like a news feature to me than the children’s television I remembered from the nineties. Watching a person lean out to balance the machine on the bends was wild. I thought about how exciting it might have been to see that as a young viewer, although I was still trying to understand the programme.

Then I watched Peter Duncan in a clip about cleaning Big Ben. I’d picked it partly because I saw a cat, and there was a dog too, but the animals were soon overtaken by something much more stressful. The presenter climbed up through the tower, then the feature moved to the people cleaning the clock face from outside.

As someone explained the wooden seat and the ropes, I started saying no before the presenter had even gone over the side. Watching him climb over the edge and sit there gave me goosebumps and a cold sweat. I wanted to tell him he could get a different job. I was sitting safely at home, feeling queasy about something happening in an old television clip.

I did love the views. The surrounding shots of London showed a time before I’d been there, before I was even alive. I wanted to look at the city while also wanting the whole height situation to stop. I was having a great time and feeling nauseous, without being much closer to a neat explanation of Blue Peter.

The internet explanation helped me understand

A 1995 feature explained the internet and showed an internet cafe. I’d never been to that sort of cafe or seen one with my own eyes, although some of the computer speakers looked familiar. Watching someone explain the internet as a new thing was fascinating.

That clip made the approach clearer to me. It wasn’t full of the brightness and speed I associated with children’s programming. Someone was explaining computers to children without dumbing everything down, almost like talking to them as real people. I found that refreshing.

Later clips moved into the sillier side of teaching things. In one, a presenter ran across custard while someone explained what was happening. That felt much closer to my Popular Mechanics for Kids comparison: a funny demonstration that was also trying to explain something. The older clips had felt completely different to me.

By the end, I’d learned that Blue Peter mixed different features, challenges and activities for children, including the crafts I’d originally expected. I had a much better understanding of why the clips had seemed so varied. I loved getting to learn about something that hadn’t appeared in my day-to-day life here, and I wanted to try some of the makes in the book. That part was still ahead of me.

Watch the original WHAT IS BLUE PETER?? | First time watching CLASSIC Blue Peter video.