Biddy Baxter: The stiletto-shod dictator who ruled Blue Peter with a rod of iron
Not many TV producers become famous but there’s no question Biddy Baxter, who ran Blue Peter – now the longest running children’s programme in the world – for more than a quarter of a century was better known than many of the presenters.
It was Biddy who reigned supreme over the show’s rich mix of action, adventure, animals and nature.
She championed the hugely popular Blue Peter “makes” – everything from a doll’s sitting room to presents for all the family – and it was Biddy who introduced the annual appeals, which raised millions of pounds for good causes at home and abroad, usually by getting viewers to collect junk items for recycling.
Her alliterative name, credited at the end of every programme twice a week, ten months a year, appealed to children and proved memorable for adults too.
In fact, Biddy wasn’t her real name at all; born on May 25, 1933, she was christened Joan Maureen Baxter.
Joan was then a highly popular girl’s name (Joan Collins is an exact contemporary born two days earlier) and on little Joan Baxter’s first day at school, the teacher was faced with a class full of girls who all shared it.
In desperation, she asked her new pupil: “Do you have another name?” “Yes. Biddy,” came the unhesitating reply.
READ MORE: Biddy Baxter put the Blue in Peter, says RICHARD MADELEY
No one had ever called her this before but the name stuck.
It was an early example of Biddy’s supreme self-confidence which would propel her to the top of the TV ranks at a time when it was very unusual for women to aspire to such heights.
Biddy, now aged 90 and living quietly in her elegant flat in central London, joined the BBC in 1955, as a studio manager in radio, after a terrifying interview.
An official asked sternly: “Tell me, Miss Baxter, what would you do in a small space with a screwdriver?” Her answer, alas, is lost in the mists of time.
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Her first job was to run the technical side of the studio, including making all the sound effects – footsteps crunching in the snow or the chink of tea cups at a party.
There were various disasters; on one occasion she accidentally upended a huge studio screen onto a rather grand and elderly actress from the BBC repertory company. Another time, she caused the overseas news to go out ten minutes late.
“It was the worst moment of my life,” she recalls.
A written post-mortem was required but a senior manager took pity on her and rewrote her account shifting the blame from Biddy to a technical issue. “It wasn’t my fault anymore,” she laughs. “My first lesson in the great BBC tradition of passing the buck.”
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As she made her way from radio to television, inevitably, she encountered plenty of sexism. But there were no #MeToo moments for Biddy. “I used to find a knee in the b******s worked wonders,” is how she puts it.
She took over the running of Blue Peter, then a relatively insignificant once-a-week programme, in November 1962.
From the very start, she stood out. Tall, blonde and curvaceous, she always dressed to impress, in designer clothes and eye-catching jewellery.
She became famous for her trademark stiletto heels, despite BBC rules prohibiting them from being worn on the studio floor.
The studio was Biddy’s kingdom and the backdrop to all her aspirations to build the programme’s reach and power.
She did away with a traditional set; instead, there was a kind of vast brightly lit open space in which, she insisted, “anything can happen” – and if, for example, a flock of penguins wandered off into the parts of the studio viewers weren’t meant to see, Biddy commanded that the cameras should follow.
Audiences quickly responded to her approach and in 1964, the BBC decided to make the show twice-weekly.
It was a remorseless schedule and Biddy led from the front, rarely taking a day off. If one of the presenters was too ill to turn up, she operated a strict “no show, no dough” policy – thereby ensuring attendance in the face of flu and other ailments.
She was uncompromising in her dealings with her stars. “It was always criticism rather than praise,” recalls presenter Peter Purves (1967-78). “She was absolutely a control freak. There was something about the way she dealt with us that just riled me to bits. Val [Singleton] felt exactly the same. John [Noakes] hated her as well.”
Despite her haute-couture image and cut-glass accent, Biddy could and often did swear like a trooper. Presenter and future Chief Scout Peter Duncan (1980-1986) was first invited to join the show in 1978. Biddy suggested he visit the studio to watch a live transmission. “There was a lot of effing and blinding going on – liberal use of the ‘C’ word,” he laughs. “It was aggressive but quite exciting.”
Duncan thought better about joining and turned the job down. It was a further two years before he accepted another offer to join the team. In the interim, Biddy continued to fight hard to get the biggest studios and the best facilities. Another long-running BBC show, Tomorrow’s World, became a mortal enemy as they too laid claim to the best of Television Centre’s resources.
“She would want to have a parade of guardsmen in the car park at the same time as we needed it to test a new robot,” remembers former Tomorrow’s World Editor Richard Reisz. “Her attitude was, ‘I’m afraid we need it, so you’ll have to find somewhere else’.” Her trump card was her excellent relationship with most of the BBC’s senior (and mostly male) management. “If there was a stalemate,” explains one of her producers, “she would just put in a call to the Controller of BBC1. She treated him like an oversized school child.”
When incoming Controller Michael Grade attempted to save money by compelling Blue Peter and Tomorrow’s World to share a studio, Biddy went into battle.
“Oh my God!” says Grade. “Every time I saw her, she was relentless and passionate that this couldn’t work. Her life was that show. Without that obsessional talent, the programme would never have maintained the quality that it did.”
The Blue Peter garden (an idea nicked from ITV’s rival show Magpie) was fashioned from a piece of wasteland at the back of the Television Centre restaurant block. “Biddy claimed it like Captain Cook,” her colleague and boss, Edward Barnes, later recalled.
Animals were a major part of the programme’s appeal; not just the visiting kind (most famously, Lulu the defecating elephant, in 1969) but the menagerie of pets, from Petra and Shep the dogs, to Jason and Jack and Jill the cats, as well as sundry parrots. “Fur and feather are more popular than flesh,” Biddy used to caution recalcitrant presenters.
It was deemed crucial to keep the pets in vision as much as possible – an incensed Biddy once threw her handbag at a director who had failed to capture a close-up of Goldie, the show’s golden retriever.
Pets’ birthdays were always the cause of big celebration. When the late Caron Keating suggested presenters’ might be celebrated too, Biddy told her: “Oh darling! You’d never get as many cards as the dog!”
The success of the show made it catnip for visiting celebrities. Paul McCartney rang, offering to promote his Frog Chorus single. “So sorry, darling,” Biddy replied. “I don’t think children will know who you are.”
When Elton John appeared in 1983, the assistant producer assigned to him asked why he had agreed to appear. “Because I want to meet Biddy Baxter,” he replied. “Is it true she wears high heels in the studio?”
After hours of painstaking rehearsal, each studio day culminated in a live show. There was no autocue – presenters were expected to learn the script and cope with Biddy’s last-minute cuts and changes.
“You knew by the pace of her heels how bad you had been,” laughs presenter Peter Duncan (1980-86). Simon Groom (1978-86) adds: “Biddy’s script would be covered in subtle comments like ‘rubbish’, ‘mean it’ or ‘not convincing’, almost as though she was marking a piece of schoolwork.”
It was a tough system but her quest for perfection gave the show its reputation and many of her hard-driven presenters now look back with admiration. “Biddy was the best teacher,” believes Janet Ellis (1983-87). “The show was successful because of Biddy, not in spite of her,” adds Peter Purves (1967-78). “Her control of the programme was exemplary.”
Biddy never quit Blue Peter.
Instead, she was manoeuvred out in the summer of 1988 by a new head of children’s programmes who wanted the show to evolve without its all-powerful matriarch.
Although devastated in private, in public Biddy went quietly. She had no interest in making another TV show – what could top Blue Peter? Instead, she worked freelance as a consultant for various Director Generals until her retirement in 2000.
Despite her instinctive grasp of what interested them, Biddy never had children. Asked about this by journalist Mark Lawson, she pointed out that “Rose West was a mother!”
The truth was that Blue Peter was her baby. Uninterested in domesticity, she could never have achieved her career while being a wife and mother. Her long-term partner, the eminent musicologist John Hosier, understood her need for space. They socialised, entertained and went on holiday together, but lived apart – only marrying weeks before his premature death in 2000.
I followed Biddy as Editor from 2003-2007 and the programme adhered to the high standards she set. As I got to know her, and felt the force of her remarkable personality, I knew her story would make the stuff of a fascinating biography.
But perhaps most significantly, for all the awards and acclaim that accompanied her years at the top, she never lost sight of what it was to see the world from a child’s point of view.
Richard Marson is a former Blue Peter editor-in-chief and TV historian.
- Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (Ten Acre Films, £17.99) is out now. Order via tenacrefilms.bigcartel.com.