Captain of the Blue Peter ship

FOR a quarter of a century Biddy Baxter steered Blue Peter to ratings success, her iron grip on its rudder.

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Baxter took over as producer of the classic BBC children's show in 1962 with a brief to revitalise “a rundown property with potential for improvement”.

She established a card index system to ensure that children who wrote in would never receive the same reply twice, having been devastated as a child to find that she received the same standard letter when she twice wrote to her favourite author, Enid Blyton.