Blue Peter presenter number 8 was Simon Groom, a fresh faced young fellow from the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, he joined the team in 1978 as a replacement for the quintessentially smooth, confident and professional Purves.
Brought up on a farm in Dethick and educated at Birmingham University, Groom was to have an eight year tenure as a BP presenter, seeing off many other presenters who came and went along the way.
Groom might be described as the presenter who straddled the transition period between what is often described as the golden period of Blue Peter, i.e. Singleton, Noakes and Purves into the trendier era of the 1980s with all its challenges to keep a new generation on board whilst not losing the much-loved format. Groom achieved this with ease through his consistently friendly and engaging manner. Eighteen months working as a teacher before joining the BBC gave him the confident style of the archetypal 'everyone's favourite history teacher' or even as that youthful uncle that the high-spirited kids always gather around at family gatherings.
Whilst he may initially have been perceived as the new straight-man to the veteran super-clown Noakesy, Groom was to stamp his individual mark as a Blue Peter mainstay and, in the words of Baxter and Barnes, he grew into the role.
Groom had become interested in television when period drama director Dorothea Brooking filmed A Traveller in Time at his father's Tudor farmhouse. Whilst neither Judd nor Singleton were seen floating elegantly around on this particular film set, even so it was enough to set the tenacious farmer's lad on a mission to get himself a broadcasting career, which included a stint in Germany working as a DJ (well who'd have thought it!)
Simon Groom is probably best remembered for being master of ad lib innuendo on Blue Peter, amusing members of the production crew and the liberal mums and dads alert enough to spot his smutty remarks prior to them being highlighted to the whole nation by Barry Took, but being completely missed by the programme's audience of children (well, we assume so).
Classics include describing the door knocker on the front of Durham Cathedral as "a beautiful pair of knockers". Another remark followed a piece about hedge maintenance where he closed with the remark, "As long as you have a decent length to start with, well then you can manage a good lay."
Even in his audition for Blue Peter, as described by Baxter and Barnes in their book Inside Blue Peter he managed to make the entire studio collapse into hysterical laughter whilst being put through a trampoline lesson from English national coach, Rob Walker. When Rob instructed him to "jump and bring your knees up - then sit down on the trampoline", Groom followed the instructions adding "Is this called a touch up?". "No" shouted the confused coach, "you mean a tuck jump!"
I'm not sure on this brief telling of the story whether Baxter and Barnes specifically got what the rest of the studio might have been hysterically collapsed by, but Groom's unfortunate fluff on this first occasion didn't seem to put them off giving him the job.
Baxter and Barnes said "Simon may have felt he had blown it, but we were impressed. No presenter can ever be a carbon copy of another and we thought a country lad would bring a new dimension to the programme. He might have trouble learning his lines, but at least he would have no problem being himself. And he wouldn't have an actor's ego to overcome."
And so it was, with a little bit of touching up by Baxter and Barnes and given a visibly decent length as a presenter, Groom's knockers were confounded and the farmer's lad from Chesterfield became the Benny Hill of children's television.
Reference - Blue Peter The Inside Story, Biddy Baxter and Edward Barnes, page 149
Brought up on a farm in Dethick and educated at Birmingham University, Groom was to have an eight year tenure as a BP presenter, seeing off many other presenters who came and went along the way.
Groom might be described as the presenter who straddled the transition period between what is often described as the golden period of Blue Peter, i.e. Singleton, Noakes and Purves into the trendier era of the 1980s with all its challenges to keep a new generation on board whilst not losing the much-loved format. Groom achieved this with ease through his consistently friendly and engaging manner. Eighteen months working as a teacher before joining the BBC gave him the confident style of the archetypal 'everyone's favourite history teacher' or even as that youthful uncle that the high-spirited kids always gather around at family gatherings. Whilst he may initially have been perceived as the new straight-man to the veteran super-clown Noakesy, Groom was to stamp his individual mark as a Blue Peter mainstay and, in the words of Baxter and Barnes, he grew into the role.
Groom had become interested in television when period drama director Dorothea Brooking filmed A Traveller in Time at his father's Tudor farmhouse. Whilst neither Judd nor Singleton were seen floating elegantly around on this particular film set, even so it was enough to set the tenacious farmer's lad on a mission to get himself a broadcasting career, which included a stint in Germany working as a DJ (well who'd have thought it!)
Simon Groom is probably best remembered for being master of ad lib innuendo on Blue Peter, amusing members of the production crew and the liberal mums and dads alert enough to spot his smutty remarks prior to them being highlighted to the whole nation by Barry Took, but being completely missed by the programme's audience of children (well, we assume so).
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| Simon started on Blue Peter in May 1978 on the same day as Goldie (and I don't mean Sarah Greene) |
Even in his audition for Blue Peter, as described by Baxter and Barnes in their book Inside Blue Peter he managed to make the entire studio collapse into hysterical laughter whilst being put through a trampoline lesson from English national coach, Rob Walker. When Rob instructed him to "jump and bring your knees up - then sit down on the trampoline", Groom followed the instructions adding "Is this called a touch up?". "No" shouted the confused coach, "you mean a tuck jump!"
I'm not sure on this brief telling of the story whether Baxter and Barnes specifically got what the rest of the studio might have been hysterically collapsed by, but Groom's unfortunate fluff on this first occasion didn't seem to put them off giving him the job.
Baxter and Barnes said "Simon may have felt he had blown it, but we were impressed. No presenter can ever be a carbon copy of another and we thought a country lad would bring a new dimension to the programme. He might have trouble learning his lines, but at least he would have no problem being himself. And he wouldn't have an actor's ego to overcome."
And so it was, with a little bit of touching up by Baxter and Barnes and given a visibly decent length as a presenter, Groom's knockers were confounded and the farmer's lad from Chesterfield became the Benny Hill of children's television.
Reference - Blue Peter The Inside Story, Biddy Baxter and Edward Barnes, page 149
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