The name comes from the sea. The Blue Peter is the maritime signal flag a ship flies when it is about to leave port, and when the show's creators were looking for a name in 1958, that idea of a journey just beginning was exactly what they wanted. The original presenters were Christopher Trace, an actor, and Leila Williams, who had been crowned Miss Great Britain the previous year. The programme went out live for fifteen minutes on Thursday afternoons, and by the standards of 1958 it was almost startlingly modest - studio bound, gently educational, divided cleanly along the gender lines of the era. As the broadcasting historian Asa Briggs later put it: Leila played with dolls; Chris played with trains. From those tidy beginnings, almost everything that would make Blue Peter famous was still to come.

The person who shaped Blue Peter more than any other was Biddy Baxter, who arrived as a producer in 1962 and stayed for nearly twenty-six years, twenty-three of them as editor. Baxter had once written, as a child, to Enid Blyton and received a standard form reply that arrived twice. She never forgot how that felt. When she took over Blue Peter she insisted that every letter from a viewer received a personal answer. She introduced the badge - blue, ship-shaped, designed by the artist Tony Hart - in 1963, and made it the most coveted accessory in British primary schools. She introduced the appeals, which raised money for everything from RNLI lifeboats to Operation Smile. And she insisted that recordings be kept, which is why almost every Blue Peter episode from 1964 onwards still survives in the BBC archives, an unusual treasure for television of that era.

What people remember most about Blue Peter is what went wrong on live television, and there is a lot to remember. In 1969, a baby elephant called Lulu was brought into the studio and proceeded to relieve herself enthusiastically on the floor, then appeared to tread on presenter John Noakes's foot, and then attempted an exit dragging her keeper along behind her. The clip has been replayed for fifty years. Petra the dog, the first Blue Peter pet, joined in December 1962 and promptly died of distemper - so producers Edward Barnes and Biddy Baxter quietly searched London pet shops for a replacement and never told the viewers. There were tortoises, cats, parrots. There was John Noakes climbing Nelson's Column to clean it. There was Lesley Judd interviewing Otto Frank in 1976 about his daughter's diaries. The show could be silly and serious in the same half hour.

The Blue Peter Garden was opened in 1974 in a green space outside the BBC Television Centre restaurant, designed by the horticulturalist Percy Thrower. It had a sunken Italian section with a goldfish pond, a vegetable patch, a greenhouse. Petra was commemorated there with a bust after her death in 1977. George the Tortoise was buried there in 2004. In 1983, vandals broke in and wrecked the garden - a rumour persisted for years that the gang included future England footballers Dennis Wise and Les Ferdinand as teenagers, an accusation both men denied, though Ferdinand later joked about having helped a few people over the wall. Meanwhile the appeals raised millions: twenty-five lifeboats for the RNLI alone, all funded by children collecting milk-bottle tops and used stamps and selling cakes in the rain.

The show moved north in 2011, from Television Centre in London to MediaCityUK in Salford, and a second garden was opened there by Princess Anne in 2012. It moved again in 2025, to Campfield Studios in central Manchester. After sixty-six years of mostly live broadcasts, Blue Peter went fully pre-recorded in March 2025 - episodes now appear first on BBC iPlayer before reaching CBBC later in the day. The format has changed, but the badge has not. It still gets you free admission to attractions across Britain. There is now a Silver badge for kindness, a Green badge for environmental work, a Gold badge for exceptional achievement that has been awarded to Ed Sheeran and Queen Elizabeth II and small children who saved family members from house fires. Over 5,000 editions and counting. Here is one they made earlier - five thousand and more times over.