Baxter Basics

Chris Hallam pays tribute to the formidable woman who made Blue Peter what it is

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Biddy Baxter was the single most important figure in the history of Blue Peter. She rarely appeared on screen in the long-running children's magazine show herself but was nevertheless more famous than many of its presenters. A generation of viewers could easily identify her unusual name as the last one to come up during the Blue Peter closing titles sequence.

She was not there at the very beginning. The task of creating Blue Peter in 1958 had fallen to producer John Hunter Blair, an eccentric, pipe-smoking bachelor and model railway enthusiast. By 1962, Blair had retired due to heart problems (he would die in 1964) and Biddy Baxter, a woman barely in her 30s was taken on as a permanent producer.

Born in Leicester in 1933, Maureen Baxter had been nicknamed "Biddy" early on to distinguish her from all the other Maureens at her grammar school. The daughter of a teacher who later ran his own sportswear company, she went to Durham University and originally aspired to be either a social worker or a prison officer. She instead joined the BBC in 1955 after replying to an advertisement, initially working in radio.

By the time Biddy clambered onboard, Blue Peter was in crisis. Original co-host Leila Williams, a former Miss Great Britain had just been fired, and her replacement, Anita West, was already on her way out as she faced what was then the potential scandal of imminent divorce. The BBC privately regarded the children's magazine show as being like "a rundown property with potential for improvement", while the channel as a whole was under constant siege as a result of the continued success of ITV.