John Noakes

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John Noakes (born 6 March 1934, in Shelf, Halifax, Yorkshire, England) is a British actor, presenter and television personality, best known for co-presenting the BBC children's magazine programme Blue Peter in the 1960s and 1970s. He remains the show's longest-serving presenter, with a stint that lasted 12 years and 6 months. He studied at Rishworth School in Rishworth, Halifax.

Noakes worked as an aircraft engine fitter and then as an actor (appearing on television in programmes such as the military police drama series Redcap), before he became a Blue Peter presenter on 30 December 1965, joining Christopher Trace and Valerie Singleton. Trace left the programme in 1967, and was replaced by Peter Purves, thus creating the famous 'Val, John and Pete' line-up that lasted until 1972, probably the most popular set of presenters the programme has had in its long history. After Singleton's departure, Noakes and Purves presented with Lesley Judd, another popular (and even longer-running) line-up. At a time when most BBC presenters spoke with received pronunciation, Noakes's broad Yorkshire accent was a novelty.

Noakes usually played the role of action man in the programme. Highlights included free-fall parachuting with the Red Devils and bobsleighing (his sled hit a hole in the ice and turned over, injuring him). For a few years, he held the record for the longest free-fall parachute jump by a British civilian, although it has since been broken.

Like most presenters, Noakes was encouraged to take special responsibility for one of the shows pets. His original dog was Patch, the son of Petra, the very first Blue Peter dog). After Patch's sudden death in 1971 (from a rare disease), he was given another pet dog, Shep, a Border Collie. His attempts to control the excitable Shep led to his memorable catchphrase 'Get down, Shep!'.

Concurrent with his work on Blue Peter, Noakes and Shep starred in another factual series, Go With Noakes, in which they travelled around the country getting involved in activities as diverse as motor racing, rowing, aerobatics and painting. Go With Noakes began on 28 March 1976, and would run for five series and 30 episodes, finishing its original run on 21 December 1980.^[1]

Noakes finally left Blue Peter on 26 June 1978.^[2] Popular belief has it that he was not allowed to keep Shep, but although the dog was indeed legally owned by the BBC, Noakes was permitted to keep him. However, according to the behind-the-scenes book The Inside Story Of Blue Peter (by the show's longest-serving Editor, Biddy Baxter), the BBC stopped giving him the special regular payments he had previously received to pay for Shep's food and vet bills (what Noakes referred to as his 'dog money'). This rankled with him, even more so when, after Noakes had been offered lucrative work advertising dog food, the BBC stipulated that Shep could not appear in the commercial with him. In the end, Noakes did the commercial with a lookalike collie named Skip.

In 1982, he and his wife made an unsuccessful attempt to sail around the world. A second attempt in 1984 got no further than Majorca, where they settled down to run a boat rental business.

1983 saw Noakes presenting The Dinosaur Trail, a lively 7-part documentary for Children's ITV.

Between 1986 and 1988, the BBC produced a programme called Fax!, which was designed to cash in on the then-current trivia craze by finding answers to random questions posed by viewers. One question was 'Whatever happened to John Noakes and Shep?' Noakes and his wife appeared on the show on 20 January 1987 to reveal what he had been doing since retiring from television, and during the course of the interview, Noakes tearfully revealed that Shep had died just days beforehand.^[3]

Notwithstanding his status as a pop culture icon for a whole generation, Noakes has become publicly bitter about his Blue Peter experiences. Despite having come across as a very natural presenter, he claimed his television personality was a fake, and he was merely acting a role. He also complained about his perceived low salary during his time on Blue Peter, and expressed disgust that he had apparently never been insured for any of the stunts he had undertaken, claiming that he would never have gone through with them had he been aware of this at the time. The Purves/Singleton/Noakes team was reunited in January 2000 for the disinterment of the time capsule that they had buried in 1971, though Noakes appeared without much apparent enthusiasm.

In 2004, Noakes took part in the Living TV reality TV show I'm Famous and Frightened!. A year later, he appeared in the Channel 5 programme Britain's Worst Celebrity Driver.

A view of John Noakes as a childhood icon of the 1960's and 70's can be found here http://www.ayup.co.uk/loud/loud0-2.html