Читать книгу We’re British, Innit: An Irreverent A to Z of All Things British - Iain Aitch - Страница 18

Very much the official BBC view of how children should be seen, Blue Peter has been an institution of British broadcasting since 1958. The show has always represented an idealised middle-class view of childhood, with its repertoire of craft activities, good works, animal husbandry and nature study. This all went along jolly nicely until the ITV network started to show Magpie in 1968, a programme that, if some middle-class parents were to be believed (see class), was tantamount to Satanism. Magpie presenters just lolled around in a stupor, urging viewers to attack the Blue Peter garden, plant Sherbet Dib-Dabs on the BBC show’s presenters and make them senselessly rig competitions to decide the names of pets. But it was Blue Peter’s optimistic altruism that dealt the show’s ethics one of its greatest blows when in 1981 it broadcast a short film about cerebral-palsy sufferer Joey Deacon. Within days, Joey mania had spread across the country, with children imitating Deacon’s guttural attempts at speech and labelling anyone weak or different as a ‘Joey’. The slang term persists to this day.