Happy Birthday Blue Peter- BBC TV national treasure.

Happy Birthday Blue Peter- BBC TV national treasure.

For a generation who grew up on BBC TV classic children's programmes Blue Peter had everything. It was instructive and educational, enlightening and revealing, gentle and inoffensive. It was thought provoking and charitable, very seasonal and utterly topical. It led us into worlds none of us had ever  explored before and travelled the world to make us feel at home. It was moving and funny, relevant and never dated. And you know what. It still is - quite convincingly.

Next month Blue Peter celebrates its 60th birthday and you feel sure it deserves not only the traditional birthday cake and candles but the obligatory set of Blue Peter badges and a number of trophies. It hardly seems possible that after 60 years of bringing the very best in children's TV into our living rooms, Blue Peter is entering its diamond age. Undoubtedly one of the most influential of kids programmes Blue Peter is still around, still alive, full of informative facts and figures to keep us all entertained well into future generations.

How grateful were we all those years ago to sit in front of our DER telly set at exactly the point when mum put the kettle on for tea, school was over for another day, the kids came in from next door and then there was a general frisson of activity. We plonked ourselves regularly in front of our black and white Pandora's box of fun and found out that the programme we were watching had been on since the latter days of Bill Haley and Comets rock and roll extravaganzas.

After an excited moment of finger pointing amazement, we cast our eyes upon what to us was the best thing since sliced bread, butter, jam and the most enticing of Swiss jam rolls. It was indeed Blue Peter. Eventually it would become our national anthem because we thought this was TV royalty, a programme that catered specifically for us, pandering to our whims, capturing our imaginations and stimulating our burgeoning intellect. This was good stuff, the stuff we knew we were going to like because all of the neighbourhood kids were watching it and they were just hooked.

With that wonderfully naval and nautical music to open the show, Blue Peter became for us essential viewing, compulsive viewing, excellent entertainment. There was a time during the late 1960s when we somehow felt duty bound to watch Blue Peter because we knew for a fact that we were bound to learn something that maybe we had no knowledge of before.

In a sense it was rather like a natural extension of our primary school because in a sense we were still in a classroom but a classroom with a difference. Here we had a programme with amiable presenters who'd obviously attended etiquette classes because quite clearly they'd never ever been anywhere near either alcohol or drugs and besides Blue Peter was clean cut, respectable, polite and intelligent.

It must have been the late 1960s when Blue Peter first came to my attention. There was lovely Valerie Singleton, the delightfully amusing John Noakes and Peter Purves. For as long as any of us can remember all three seemed to be permanently moored to their seat in the middle of the studio. They would sit there, seemingly for the duration of the programme perhaps reflecting on the latest developments in  Dr Finlay's Casebook, Dixon of Dock Green or That Was The Week That Was.

But then you were suddenly distracted by the Blue Peter dogs. Now the Blue Peter dogs enjoyed a very privileged position in the Blue Peter hierarchy. They were top dogs, superstars, household legends, spoilt something rotten, pampered almost incessantly and never forgotten. There was the sadly brief appearance of Petra before Shep sat very comfortably next to Val, John and Peter but particularly John because John Noakes developed a lifelong friendship with Shep. Shep went everywhere with John and the alliance was deeply moving. When Shep died John Noakes was heartbroken, mortified, barely able to control his grief and sadness.

Blue Peter was though a radical and pioneering children's TV programme because before then TV and children had been left in a desolate wasteland. Of course there was Muffin the Mule and the likes of Bill and Ben, Watch With Mother and Andy Pandy did occupy some of the younger and more impressionable minds but it wasn't Blue Peter and those programme controllers who were still wet behind the ears were still serving their apprenticeship.

And yet here we are at the tender age of five or six and totally absorbed by something brand new, exciting, astonishingly good and fresh. Blue Peter had a blue chip originality and imagination, a vision of the future, a programme that featured practicality as its central feature. You could make things, create things, make things with sticky backed plastic, washing up bottles, toilet rolls, biscuit tins, cereal boxes, milk bottle tops, yoghurt tops, nylon stockings perhaps, wet cloths and general domestic paraphernalia.

By the end of the programme you almost felt as though you were perfectly qualified to become an eminent fashion designer, a rocket scientist or maybe an astronaut. The world would become your oyster, your plaice, haddock, your world. Some of the programmes creations are now of course the stuff of legend.

Then right at the end of the Swinging Sixties in London at least, something deliciously funny happened in the Blue Peter studio. It was the kind of moment that any TV historian or retro archivist would have given the right arm for. It was classical TV, outstanding TV, side splittingly hilarious TV  that none of us could have expected or legislated for. 60 years later and the reverberations can still be felt in TV studios across Britain.

Take one BBC studio, three children's presenters, a dog, a couple of eager and receptive cameras sliding across the Blue Peter floor while all the time giggling their heads off and trying to stave off total embarrassment. It was supposed to be a perfectly innocent feature about a baby elephant and its adjustment to its new home. It turned into a hellish nightmare for those who still saw the programme as a bastion of morality and squeaky clean rectitude.

Lulu the elephant trundled onto the Blue Peter set with seemingly honourable intentions. Minutes into its debut on British TV, Lulu had made it abundantly clear that when you've got to go you have to go so Mother Nature took its course and what we now had was a scene from the Carry on film that was never made- Carry on Elephants. A helpless zookeeper slid and slithered around the floor complete with bucket and cap while poor Val, John and Peter desperately held everything together. We were left with the parting shot of John throwing his hands into the air laughing uncontrollably. It was TV gold.

At Christmas time of course Blue Peter wore its most humanitarian of all cloaks, a warmly charitable face that warmed the hearts of parents, families and children everywhere. The Blue Peter Christmas appeal was the programme's favourite time of the year. There were tinsel festooned Christmas trees, glitter and baubles everywhere with no expense spared, Advent Calendars and festive cards with festive messages. All good clean fun.

But a couple of weeks before Christmas the Blue Peter charity appeal board showed just how much the children had raised, lighting up almost happily when substantial amounts had been made. There was and still is a good, old fashioned civility and correctness about the programme that always seems to deliver.

From its early days at the end of the 1950s, through to the 60s, 70s,80s,90s, early 2000 years and now the present day Blue Peter remains a beacon for everything that is good and civilised. Blue Peter seems to have the highest of moral standards and values without ever descending into banality and boredom. Of course there were the off set private wrangles, petty arguments and silly confrontations but what TV programme would ever claim that everything had gone absolutely right from day one?

So it is that we rejoice in the marvellous longevity of Britain's greatest children's TV programme. Where on earth have those 60 years gone because some of us are just baffled. At this rate Radio Four's The Archers may have to doff its cap to another long running BBC jewel in the crown in Blue Peter. Or maybe Desert Island Discs should take its respectful bow and extend its heartfelt  congratulations to its worthiest contemporary.

When the children of our generation cast our minds back to those halcyon days of giggly, cheerful, happy go lucky TV they will recall just what childhood meant to us.  It was a time when, as some of our most nostalgic friends never tire of reminding of us, you could leave your back door open, the kids could play on their bikes until midnight and the smell of pale ale would drift fragrantly from the local off licence. Blue Peter was our guilty pleasure, the kids programme that brought an eternal smile to well scrubbed faces. Well done Blue Peter. 60 years old hey! What a notable landmark, what a programme.