In its 49 year history, there have only ever been two scandals to hit Blue Peter – once when Valerie Singleton showed her ankle and once when the phrase "red-hot titwank" was accidentally used to introduce a regional trampoline display team in 1984.
But now the biggest scandal of them all has hit Blue Peter – Blue Peter has become caught up in all this cheaty rip-off premium rate phonecall malarkey after it was revealed that a "technical failure" in the Blue Peter phone system meant that a girl who was visiting the Blue Peter studios had to pretend to be a telephone competition winner, effectively conning everyone who called in out of a prize. Blue Peter has now apologised unequivocally for this phonecall balls-up, and the BBC is preparing to dole out the harshest punishment available – making Blue Peter take its summer expedition in Dungeness this year.
Forget all that nonsense we opened the article with – Blue Peter knows all about scandal. Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon was fired for taking cocaine, Janet Ellis was sacked from Blue Peter for being unmarried and pregnant, Peter Duncan used to get his knob out in films and the high watermark for John Leslie post-Blue Peter was having it off with Abi Titmuss and a prostitute for everyone on the internet to see.
But these were all scandals concerning Blue Peter presenters, not Blue Peter itself. The closest the show has come to that was when touts started selling fake Blue Peter badges on eBay so that people could get free entry to London Zoo with them. But this new scandal has overshadowed even that – Blue Peter has been caught up in the same kind of phonecall rip-off kerfuffle that started with Richard And Judy apologising for everything and has gone on to possibly include shows like Saturday Kitchen, X Factor, I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here and some Channel Five show that nobody even watched anyway. Worse still, in the wake of all this ITV has decided to get rid of phone-in gameshow channel ITV Play. Our estranged friend Debbie King must be heartbroken.
But anyway, back to Blue Peter. In November, a competition was held for kids to win toys by phoning Blue Peter, with money raised going to UNICEF. However, when the time came to speak to a competition winner, Blue Peter encountered some kind of technical problem and a telephone was handed to a child who was visiting the Blue Peter studio instead. This Is London reports:
It was revealed that when the girl went on air she declared herself to be "calling from London" – in reality she was in the same studio as the programme presenters. The revelations came to light after the parent of another child visiting the studio at the same time blew the whistle on the shady practice by sending a email to a BBC message board saying the winner of the competition had been in the studio at the time… BBC children's controller Richard Deverell called it a "serious error of judgment". He claimed that the incident had happened after a junior member of staff had panicked. He said: "I would like to apologise unequivocally to viewers, to all the children who took part in the competition, and we have already apologised directly to the child involved and her family for this incident."… Blue Peter presenters including Konnie Huq and Zoe Salmon apologised to the programme's viewers yesterday.
When the bond of trust between children and a show like Blue Peter is broken, repairing the bond can be a tricky task. It'll take weeks of tentative bridge-building, months of forensic fact-checking and by-the-books procedures and – most importantly – it'll take Konnie Huq coming to hecklerspray HQ and agreeing to be our girlfriend. But mainly that last one.
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Dan Teetree says
At least UNICEF still got all the money, didn’t they? It’s not quite the same as X Factor overcharging for votes