The world is an evil place. There are plenty of things to worry about: men rampaging through streets with guns, endless suicide attacks, people selling phony Blue Peter badges on the Internet.

You read that right – some unscrupulous sellers have been hawking dummy Blue Peter badges on eBay, claiming that Blue Peter badge-wearers can gain entry into more than 100 public attractions. The bastards – don’t they know that Blue Peter badges are just for geeky friendless youngsters and nobody else?

It’s the biggest controversy to hit eBay since Bob Geldof flipped his wig about Live 8 tickets
- apparently, a handful of enterprising salespeople have been trying to
sell fake Blue Peter (Stuff) badges on the Internet. People have been willing
to pay up to £30 for a Blue Peter badge, which also acts as a free
ticket to all kinds of public attractions, including London Zoo and The
Eden Project.

Blue Peter, possibly the most worthy children’s television show ever
made – and also the show that gave us Anthea Turner, John Leslie and,
um, Romana D’Annunzio – has freaked out at the idea of someone
using its image for evil, and has tried to get the dummy Blue Peter
badges removed from eBay. A BBC spokesperson said:

"The BBC investigations unit has been monitoring eBay over the past
few months and has noticed badges being sold in large numbers by
individual sellers. eBay has agreed to take them down as they are obviously fake."

We
can’t really see what all the fuss is about. For one thing, most people
can get a Blue Peter badge by taking a picture of a jumble sale, passing it off as their own Bring And Buy sale to help the Africans and sending it to the BBC.

And
also, although you’d get free entry into all these places with a Blue
Peter badge, chances are that you’d also get beaten up for being a bit of a loser who thinks that swanking about wearing a bit of metal with a boat on it makes them special and cool and better than you.

Yeah, we never got a Blue Peter badge. Bitter? You betcha.

Read more:

Blue Peter Badge Scam – Sky 

[story by Stuart Heritage]