BBC's Blue Peter gets serious about the civil rights movement

Children's TV doesn't have to be banal and the iconic show is to be congratulated for tackling a serious subject

Blue Peter: 1958 onwards The show has been popular with generations of kids thanks to the presenters, the pets, and the sticky back plastic creations. Occasionally struggles with a do-gooder/dullsville image: Blue Peter was an early champion of green issues, charity appeals and is generally keen on wholesome fun. Not that its presenters are always so squeaky clean: in 1998 Richard Bacon was famously sacked after a tabloid reported his cocaine habit. (Getty Images)

What would Valerie Singleton say? For generations of children Blue Peter was famous mainly as a source of information for what to do with loo rolls and milk-bottle tops. Politics, apart from the annual famine relief appeals, was a no-go area and no more likely to make an appearance on the show than swearing or pornography.

But Britain has changed since the era of Valerie, John Noakes, and Peter Purves and Blue Peter is moving with the times. Now the famous children’s programme is breaking a taboo by devoting a show to an overtly political topic, the American civil rights movement - in particular Martin Luther King’s historic walk in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. According to the BBC, the show, due to go out on Thursday, will address “violence, intimidation and difficult conditions” - not the kind of issues that the Blue Peter presenters of old tended to cover in fine detail.

Some may feel tempted to dismiss this as a heavy-handed attempt to sound “relevant” and as proof of the BBC’s capture by a politically correct brigade. But there is nothing wrong with a kid’s show veering off DIY craft projects of the make-your-own-birdfeeder variety once in a while. At a time when too many children’s programmes offer nothing more than consumerism, pop music, fantasy and froth, it seems commendable – indeed brave – on the part of Blue Peter to try and introduce young viewers to something a tad more grounded in ordinary people’s real lives. If they pull it off, they could even try another serious topic. Maybe the suffragettes?