Ex-Blue Peter presenter seeks funding for a book about the programme

by Tom Cole

Former Blue Peter presenter Mark Curry is seeking funding from the public to complete work on a book about the long-running children’s TV programme.

Trust Me I’m a Blue Peter Presenter is a project Curry has been working on for some time, in which he aims to tell the definitive story of the show and the people who made it over the last 53 years.

As well as exposing the realities of working on the programme, Curry aims to clear up various Blue Peter controversies in the book, such as whether or not ex-presenter Michael Sundin was sacked from the show for being homosexual.

He has already lined up interviews with alumni including Peter Purves, Sarah Greene, Janet Ellis, Peter Duncan, Yvette Fielding, Anthea Turner, John Leslie, Diane Louise Jordan, Liz Barker, Stuart Miles, Tina Heath, Tim Vincent and Lesley Judd, and hopes to persuade others to talk about their work on the show once the project gets under way.

However, owing to the fact that many former Blue Peter stars live in far-flung places, Curry needs donations from fans to cover travel expenses so that he can conduct interviews and carry out research for the book.

Anyone who contributes money via publisher Unbound’s website will have their name printed in every edition of the book, with further benefits available for particularly generous contributors.

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I spent yesterday talking to authors about new book projects, learning some tricks about the dark art of search engine optimisation, and writing copy for an exciting new project we’re putting up on the Unbound site (www.unbound.co.uk) on Friday. What I wasn’t doing was sitting in the Publishers Launch conference in the rather impressive new Congress Centre in the heart of what used to be London’s publishing quarter. In many ways I wish I had been, after all the main theme: ‘how publishers can start adjusting their infrastructure and overheads now for a world in which ebooks comprise half of sales’ speaks directly to the reasons we founded Unbound. What I did do was to follow the #plclondon Twitter stream across the day. Imagine my pleasure in the middle of the afternoon when I discovered that not only was Unbound being discussed, one panel – comprising who exactly I haven’t been able to determine – concluded that it definitely wasn’t the future.

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