It's nice to know a program like Blue Peter has remained around for sixty years while other similar programmes have come and gone over the years. Magpie was the biggest ITV equivalent but it only ran for about 12 years. I'm sure there was something else that ran somewhere very similar to Blue Peter and Magpie in format but didn't last very long?
When Magpie ended, it more or less split into two, with the hobbies and makes bit going off to Freetime with Mick Robertson, and the magazine elements initially being Ace Reports, and then as mentioned that mutated into CBTV around 1982 (indeed, for a while it was billed as Ace Reports - CBTV). Then in I think 1985, both those shows were replaced by Splash which was pretty much another attempt at Magpie with a facsimile presenter team. That lasted until 1988 and then Freetime came back, with Andi Peters now in charge, before the whole idea of Blue Peter-style magazine shows from Thames finally came to an end after twenty years.
Then in the mid-nineties ITV launched Sticky, produced by Mick Robertson, and in all the publicity they played up the Magpie angle, and Robertson himself said they were going for the same type of show, with a modern twist. Among the presenters were Jez Edwards and Gail Porter, presumably just after she didn't get the Blue Peter job, but it didn't last very long at all. And of course there was Echo Island on RTE.
Don’t they have a time capsule that’s due to open in 11 years time?
They buried a time capsule under the Millennium Dome but last year it was accidentally dug up during building work, hence they've been taking it on tour around the UK this year. And now, as seen in the birthday programme, there's a new time capsule in the National Archives, along with the remains of the old one.
As Val mentioned on the show, they had 28,000 entries to the time capsule competition - that's about 10% of the entire audience! Any other show would be doing well to get about 1% of the audience joining in.