Obituary
Probably the first TV producer I was aware of, even before I knew what a producer did.
Also: I had assumed she’d already died years ago.
Biddy Baxter, 92
by 37 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Musings on the byways of popular culture
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c844nlk731go
Weirdly a friend and I were talking about her yesterday in a childhood telly conversation. Sounds an absolute power ranger and especially within the hidebound BBC of the 1960s and 1970s.
No Biddy, no badges.
The pictures in the BBC article don’t really back this up but I thought one fact about her was that she had extraordinarily long hair because she never had it cut. I might be thinking of someone else.
I didn’t know Tony Hart designed the Blue Peter ship logo, though.
A bad day for legends of Children’s TV as Ray Brooks has also died.
I love Ray Brooks, not just for ‘Mr. Benn’ but for ‘The Knack’ and, best of all, despite being a fantastically good looking, talented guy in the mid-1960s, married in 1963 and stayed that way.
‘The Knack’ – oh yes, what a film. John Barry’s best soundtrack too.
Also in the best episode of ‘Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)’!!!
He also starred in Cathy Come Home
And he was great in Twin Peaks.
Where is that confounded Moose?
Probably up to something unsavory involving “sticky-backed plastic”
And in the second Peter Cushing Doctor Who film.
Ray Brooks was one I was always expecting to see in the many, many, many, cocker-nee-gangster-Guy Richie-set-the-template-let’s-copy-it films.
(He’d had previous ducking and diving whe he was in Big Deal)
Rise Of The Footsoldier – that’s had just about everyone in need of some work it at some point
Can’t get a part in Harry Potter or Eastenders*? Have you considered an Essex Gangster?
* Yes, I know Mr Benn was in Enders for a couple of years
Just the other day, when I was at a loose end, I saw a Sister Boniface mystery which, I think unfairly, included a pretty harsh caricature of Biddy Baxter.
The series is a spin off of the Mark Williams Father Brown series, and is set in the sixties. A lot of it seems to be nostalgia as much as mystery, cosy recreations of events or shows from that period, aimed at a large part of the target audience who will just about remember them. The Morse prequel Endeavour did this as well, although it took itself more seriously.
In this story, an episode of the children’s series Jolly Roger is filmed in the village. Three presenters – ex army officer, posh girl, jolly big brother type northerner. So it’s obvious what it was based on. The producer is something of a harridan, bossing around everyone, and she was deliberately dressed and made up to look like Biddy Baxter, and played by Abigail Thaw, who has some resemblance to her anyway. It seemed rather cruel, especially as the character was the murder victim, and it seemed everyone had a reason to hate her. Some obscure score settling from the present day TV world, it seemed.
Well, in the BBC article, the presenters don’t have that many nice things to say for her!
I recall that the late John Noakes loathed her. There was an interview with him in which he made no bones about his dislike.
I believe it was mutual.
When John Noakes climbed Nelson’s Column without using safety equipment, he was assured by Biddy Baxter that he was insured. Noakes was married with two young children at the time. Some time later he found out that he wasn’t insured at all and he was understandably furious. JN climbing NC is on YouTube, it makes my legs turn to jelly everytime I watch it.
I have to say that when I saw that at the time I was thinking: “Are you George Bernard?!” It seemed complete insanity.
From memory the ladder – 10 miles up in the air – was the kind of wooden thing our window-cleaner used. His never looked fit for purpose, but then he was only twenty feet off the ground.
Saw this recently but I can’t remember what it was on
Val’s dice with death
I remember watching this in disbelief. I thought then that it was a completely stupid thing to do, and still think so. How this was sanctioned I have no idea. Compared to the current level of hand-wringing hysteria over self-entitled, bullying ‘talent’ treating their colleagues badly by their actions and words, if this happened today the producer would be in an orange jump-suit, deported to Guantanamo and stripped of their citizenship within hours.
Wearing flares was an interesting sartorial choice. And there was a cameraman up there too carrying heavy equipment
Yes. The cameraman. He needs to have got up there first, every time. With all the gear. And he needs to move around the location possibly even more than the presenter to frame everything.
Even so that doesn’t take anything away from John Noakes, who had previously fallen off a bobsleigh at St Moritz and concussed himself all for us to watch before tea.
This too, Lesley Judd at 4.45. Biddy said she was very brave because she couldn’t actually swim!
Here’s John Noakes having a go at being the Button Boy, which was a tradition for young Royal Navy recruits until it was discontinued for health and safety reasons. This has to be seen to be believed.
On a related tip: the stuff about Noel’s House Party on the current Chart Music podcast had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up…
Part of that episode is also on YouTube, that they just carried on after the most horrifying crash beggars belief
I was watching this again with my kids the other day and I noticed (at 6.48) that the guy shovelling pigeon shit into his bucket while suspended in his boson’s chair is also smoking a fag! Now that is multitasking, 70s style.
I think a lot of it was how she was about Shep and Petra. The presenters did bond with the dogs and lived with them. They considered them as their own, but Baxter insisted that Shep and Petra belonged to the BBC – which was correct. I think the problem was that Baxter used the dogs as a bargaining tool when the presenters were arguing for pay rises and the like. She considered them extremely lucky to have such a great job and any dissension was responded to with hostility.
I appreciate her for what she achieved but would not like to be stuck in a lift with her, or to work for her.
Rather like, say, Kevin Rowland. I love Dexys music but I would probably find Kev a self-obsessed twunt in person.
As a child, it was always a name that stood out for me in the end credits, unusual and slightly mysterious. I had no idea who he or she was, but the name sounded significant in a British BBC kind of way, and in my imagination it had a resonance with names like Douglas Bader or Baden-Powell.
As a young child, I had a great aunt my mum would refer to as The Old Biddy. I used to think they were one and the same.
As a teenager, I grew to like her even more. Like a walnut whip, she was hard on the outside, soft on the inside, and a bit nutty up top. She didn’t give a stuff about what anyone else thought, and was happier for it. Many a happy Sunday morning spent gardening with DID blasting out of her Roberts radio.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what was wrong with BP although I loved it as a child. Collecting milk bottle tops to send tractors to Nigeria and teaching children intermediate technology to build Thunderbirds Islands.
And don’t start me on the Christmas coat hangers … my dad was a career fire officer. Bloody hell the moment they appeared I just had to get out of the room coz I knew what was coming … it started with a quiet tut tut tut but I was outta there before he could kick off.
Back in the mid-70s, our art teacher encouraged us to engage with a Blue Peter competition where you were asked to draw “The Sea I’d Like to See”. I was so pleased with my effort that I sent it in. I was genuinely hopeful that I’d be a winner.
It wasn’t until I saw the other entries that the penny dropped that I’d missed the ecological spirit of the thing. There were drawings of happy whales with no harpoons in sight, dolphins swimming in pollution-free waters teeming with life and baby seals looking relaxed and safe.
My drawing was of a giant fish finger-making machine that moved around the sea, sucking in fish from the front in a giant funnel and at the back out came perfect fish fingers. It had the Findus logo on it.
This sounds like something from Modern Toss
If Magpie had had a similar competition, you’d have won!
After three letters I finally got a Blue Peter badge which was quite odd as I’d never written in, it turns out a friend had written in on my behalf.
I found a Blue Peter badge on the pavement, wore it to school and used to pretend I’d had a letter from John Noakes. The prank backfired when someone nicked it from the changing room during a PE lesson.
A salacious rumour of the day was that Biddy was actually Raymond “Tomorrow’s World” Baxter in drag.
Started by Stanley Baxter, apparently, who is, of course, the only one still living.
She made excellent soup, apparently.