Bleep, Booster, Zebedee and Zabadak

 

 

Blue Peter memories part 2

Blue Peter is amongst my earliest television memories and must certainly have been one of the first television programmes I ever saw, probably at an age when I’d have been too young to make much, if anything of the content. Memories become less hazy around 1964 or 65, and it’s little surprise that one of the first aspects of the programme that I recollect with any clarity was the semi-regular serial Bleep and Booster (above).

Written and drawn by the artist William Timyn (always identified on screen and in print as simply ‘Tim’), Bleep and Booster told the story of a boy from Earth, ‘Booster’, who builds a space rocket in his back garden (I have to say, this struck me at age three or four as an entirely plausible scenario). Rocketing into space, Booster finds himself unable to return, but is befriended by the small, robotic inhabitant of a bleeping flying saucer. This is Bleep, the space-boy, from the planet Miron, and the stage is now set for a long-running series of outer space adventures, told entirely in the form of still images and narration. ‘Tim’ wrote the stories himself, as well as painting the illustrations in a slick, stylised black and white wash technique that was especially well-suited to depicting the shiny metal of spacecraft and other hardware. Reportedly, Timyn also shot the five-minute episodes himself, presumably making use of a rostrum camera, panning between scenes and adding zoom to bring his still pictures to life. ‘Special sound’ was provided by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic workshop, and these electronic effects lent a surprising amount of atmosphere to the stories. The narrator was Flowerpot Men and Dalek voice genius Peter Hawkins.

Bleep and Booster’s history is not well documented, and there’s a good deal of uncertainty as to when the serials began. A storybook retelling of the first adventure appeared in 1965, so it seems a safe bet to date their debut to a few months or maybe a year before. Bleep and Booster did not always feature on Blue Peter, and there would typically be maybe two serials a year, probably in the autumn or winter (my memory is of watching them with the curtains closed). At other times, ‘Tim’ provided stories of a Boxer dog pup called Bengo. His illustrations for these charming tales gave me an early artistic tip which I remembered much later – drawing smiling faces with the eyes as two semicircles.

Information online relating to Bleep and Booster is scant, and riddled with errors. Various sources claim that their adventures aired until 1977, but this is simply not true. As far as I recollect – and I can lay claim to doing so with some accuracy – Bleep and Booster did not feature in Blue Peter much after 1969 if at all, and the serials had come to an end well before the programme began to be produced in colour. Two of the last adventures – they may indeed be the very last, but information is hard to obtain – appeared on a VHS tape in the early 1990s, and anyone interested in acquainting themselves with these illustrated adventures is advised to track down a copy. Despite their absence from the small screen, Bleep and Booster continued to appear in the Blue Peter books produced each year until 1977, and their ‘after life’ in print is most likely the source of the confusion over the television screening dates.

In pure merchandising terms, Bleep and Booster were, for a time, more successful than their parent programme, and between 1965 and 1969 spawned a series of toys (including some very rare and desirable marionettes) and three annuals, all written and illustrated by ‘Tim’ in his customary style. The stories were imaginative adventures, not far removed from the Gerry Anderson template, expanding on the universe of alien beings and worlds that had appeared on television. Some memorable alien creations included the Rotundans (trunkless heads with long, tentacle-like arms and legs) and the belligerent Trugs (originally known as the Frigs, their name was changed for obvious reasons), whose hot tempers could be contained only by wearing small conical hats!

Sadly, ‘Tim’s artwork began to show signs of diminishing quality with the passage of time, and his illustrations for the Blue Peter Books from the mid ’70s onwards are noticeably less assured than the work he was producing at his peak in the mid to late ’60s. He lived until 1990, but his creations are remembered by a generation who grew up with Blue Peter during the 1960s.

The classic line-up from 1967: Peter Purves, Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, plus pets Joey, Petra, Patch and Jason

Clips of early surviving Blue Peter episodes indicate that pop groups made appearances on the programme – one example being Freddie and the Dreamers. This is one aspect of the series that I don’t recollect, and I assume that these kind of mimed studio performances must have been phased out by say 1965 which is when my earliest memories date from. One of the only examples I can recall of pop music featuring in the programmes involved Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich’s 1967 single Zabadak!, the title of which was chosen as the name for one of Petra’s grandpuppies (the other being Zebedee). The song was played in the studio while Val and John jiggled the pups up and down, although DDDBM&T did not appear themselves.

My earliest Blue Peter memories are of the two-handed presentation team of Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton. Trace came over as an affable cross between an elder brother and an uncle, and was often to be found adding components to the programme’s model railway layout, sightings of which are among my earliest recollections of the series. The layout featured no scenic detail, other than occasional items like a suspension bridge, and was used primarily as a means to highlight new arrivals in the toyshop, serving almost as a commercial for manufacturers Tri-ang/Hornby. I remember being particularly impressed by a car transporter, to the extent of asking for it at Christmas or my birthday of that year. Another set demonstrated on air was the ‘Freightliner’, highlighting the arrival on Britain’s railways of the now familiar container-based transport system (this would have been around 1967 or ’68). Again, the ‘Freightliner’ set became a Christmas present, entirely on the strength of being shown on the programme – and if that’s not a commercial, I don’t know what is!

If this sounds like blatant product placement, it should be remembered that the manufacturer’s name was never mentioned (but with Tri-ang/Hornby enjoying a virtual monopoly of the model railway business, this was hardly necessary). This sensitivity to brand names was most apparent whenever Val, John or whoever demonstrated one of their DIY model projects. Sellotape was always carefully referred to as ‘sticky tape’, and anything like a bottle of Gloy gum would have its label either removed or turned away from the camera. The ubiquitous ‘sticky-backed plastic’ was in fact available at the time from only one major manufacturer, under the ‘Fablon’ brand name, – which must have enjoyed a sales spike in the ’60s and ’70s judging from the number of times it was put to use in the making of a doll’s house or a base for Action Man (sorry, ‘your soldier doll’).

I’m not sure which is the earliest of these Blue Peter ‘makes’ that I remember, but I certainly recall John Noakes shaping polystyrene tiles into gliders, which would have occurred in maybe late 1966 or early 1967, and appeared in the book at the end of the latter year. Polystyrene tiles were pressed into use on other occasions too, and I seem to remember Christopher Trace suggesting a ‘snow landscape’ for plastic farmyard animals, which could be pressed into the polystyrene to keep them upright. Trace also presented a ‘pack away farm’ project at about the same time, featuring in the Blue Peter book at the end of 1965. Despite these being such regular items on the programme, I can’t remember attempting many of them, due in no small part to the usual requirement for about a hundred lolly sticks or empty matchboxes. Lolly sticks can be obtained by the bag these days from the average craft shop, but such places, if they even existed in the 1960s, would have been few and far between. And how many lollies could one child get through in a typical summer? Scarcely enough to cover one gable end of Action Man’s log cabin...

In between craft projects, Blue Peter was never short of interesting items, usually presented as filmed inserts. Latterly, these often came to feature John Noakes undertaking some manner of dare-devilry, but they could just as easily be on historic subjects. An item on the fate of Pompeii, shown some time in 1965 or ’66 (and never reproduced in any of the books) impressed me particularly, and I’m fairly sure served as my introduction to the concept, not to mention the chilling reality of volcanoes in general (the Blue Peter team would later visit the slopes of the erupting Mount Etna in 1971). Indeed, looking back, I’m surprised at how much of what I now consider ‘general knowledge’ or trivia has its origins in a Blue Peter item: Frost Fairs on the Thames; The Great Fire of London; how stamps are printed; the Royal Mint; Big Ben; the history of ‘Silent Night’... these and countless other topics first became known to me through items included in editions of Blue Peter, and what holds good for me must also apply to others too. I doubt any other television programme can make the same claim.

The books, of course, always drew on items that had featured in the programme over the preceding eighteen months or so (the average annual requiring something like a year to produce and print), and these pictorial accounts served to refresh the memory of what had been seen on screen. As late as 1974, when I acquired a second-hand copy of the Blue Peter book from 1966, I was still able to remember seeing items on screen such as the story of a stricken merchant navy vessel, the Flying Enterprise, and an item about the origins of the London Fire Brigade.

Everyone points to John Noakes as the quintessential Blue Peter presenter, and his skill as a broadcaster, coupled with his avuncular, easy-going everyman persona cannot be over-stated. Yet I’d always preferred Christopher Trace, who in 1965 and ’66 was also to be found presenting Junior Choice on the BBC Light Programme (a role later filled definitively by Ed Stewart). My preference for Chris over Val probably had a lot to do with the types of items each would present. Gender stereotyping was never a worry in the 1960s, and it made perfect sense for Val to host an item about dolls’ houses while Chris looked at the latest developments in model cars and railways, thus guaranteeing the loyalty of small boys like myself. The departure of Christopher Trace marked, for me, the first watershed in my memories of the programme, and I can still remember the months during which Blue Peter was reduced to just Val, John and the pets. Peter Purves, if memory served, first appeared in a filmed segment about life-saving, shot in a swimming baths and broadcast towards the end of 1967. Purves turned out to be an ideal choice to replace Chris, and his friendly persona shines through in every photograph of him in the Blue Peter annuals. I’d never seen him in Dr. Who, so had no preconceptions about him when he joined the team, and he seemed at home and at ease right from the word go. A bantering relationship soon developed with Noakes, and when the two of them went off on some assignment together, the results could be hilarious. I remember one example that saw the pair undertaking something like an assault course in the middle of a forest. Arriving at a point where their route diverged, they stood for a moment debating on which way to go until the army instructor, or whoever was in charge, popped up from behind a tree yelling ‘that way!’ This may not sound like much, but such little moments of humour were not only innovative in children’s television of the time – they helped pave the way for some of the television we have today.

Blue Peter’s DNA is all over modern programming. The Clarkson/Hammond/May era of Top Gear was clearly in its debt, taking the old construction projects to absurd new heights, to say nothing of their ventures into foreign climes. And one can clearly see the legacy in series like Michael Portillo’s Great... Railway Journeys, every edition of which is made up of the kind of features that appeared regularly on Blue Peter (and I dare say, even some of the exact same items). Even a show like QI, with its focus on arcane information, looks back to the example of Val, John et al.

Blue Peter, of course, continues to exist. The BBC would probably refer to it now as a ‘brand’, but I won’t. Neither have I much interest in what the programme now comprises other than to observe that, as a template for children’s television, it has to be preferable to many of the often inane alternatives on offer to today’s audience. If we can say that a programme like Blue Peter provided a service to viewers in the ’60s and ’70s, then it was as an encouragement to be creative (with or without sticky-back plastic), or to get out and see things, and go places. It was an introduction to topics of both contemporary and historical interest, and beyond all that, it was just good, no-nonsense television entertainment.