Biddy Baxter and the perils of remembering the past

I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t sell you a pup). There is always fun to be had in the gap between the transmitted, necessarily anodyne, product of children’s TV and the real-life shenanigans backstage, and the story of the often forbidding Biddy serves this up in satisfyingly salty dollops. In the collegiate, committee-ridden atmosphere of TV production, Baxter was a rare tyrant but one who always put the viewer ahead of any other consideration. Making TV is a battle; the reason so much of it is so bad is that the people involved don’t have the stomach to fight. Baxter did, and the accounts of her clashes with beloved nationally treasured presenters are a delight.  

But as I read, I was taken by another thought. They used to say, back in the analogue age, that it was always the other side of a press clipping that, when you looked at it years later, was more interesting.