What I love most about this front cover is Pete's multi-coloured shirt, I do recall that fashion as it happens although I was probably just too young in 1972 to possess such an item, but old enough to remember how cool they looked. I'm sure there were jumpers of a similar design too. I wonder if Peter wore it for this photograph with the intention of suggesting a palette of colours for kids to apply in their colouring book.
You'd be right in thinking there isn't a great deal to comment on about a colouring book and once you've seen one, well you've seen them all. But notable in this one is a sketch of the FA Cup on one of the pages and I wonder if that relates to a story Blue Peter once did about the theft of the FA Cup from one of our local sports shops in my home town of Birmingham. My team Aston Villa had won the FA Cup and allowed a sports shop owner, Mr Shillock if memory serves me right from studying the story in my BP annual, to display the cup in his front window in the Newtown area of the city.
One night someone broke into Mr Shillock's shop and made off with the cup, never to be seen again. Sometime in the 1970s I remember reading that an old villain in the Aston area had claimed it was he that had stolen the said cup and melted it down, but I recall that the Birmingham Mail doubted his story because he got a lot of facts wrong about the break-in.
The longstanding brag amongst Villa fans is that we've had the FA Cup stolen more times than local rivals Birmingham City have won it.
But anyway, looking at some of the other sketches to be coloured in, in this book, I recognise one or two images from Blue Peter programme features back in the day, such as the flying men of Papantla in Mexico and Daniel Lambert, Leicester's famous 'large' man weighing 52 stones 11 pounds. Both of whom have reputedly been given better odds of one day winning the FA Cup than the Blues.
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