Here’s one we definitely made earlier – the children’s show Blue Peter has been axed from TV and will no longer be filmed live. The golden age of children’s television when eight million children sat down to watch the show on three times a week has come to an end.

Sadly there isn’t enough sticky-backed plastic to put this one back together and after 66 years, the very last episode of Blue Peter was recorded live on March 21. Show bosses kept the big switch-off secret, and the news that it is moving online has been met by an outpouring of sadness and nostalgia by former presenters and the public.

Popular 80s host Janet Ellis says the show will lose its “live” magic, as future generations will never know the joy of watching someone being bitten by an animal live on TV – before running off to get an emergency tetanus shot.

“Presenters will never know the anticipation that went with the drumroll at the start of the signature tune,” she said. “The threat of things going wrong and the magnificent sense of camaraderie when they went right. Live TV is unlike anything else.”

Despite the old adage, never work with children, animals (or blenders in the cooking demonstrations), Blue Peter became famous for its live bloopers, feeding TV cock-up shows like It’ll Be All Right On The Night and Auntie’s Bloomers for years, which even now, still make great fodder on .

One of its most famous rogue animals was Chessington Zoo’s baby elephant Lulu who was invited to the old Lime Grove studios in 1969. All went well in rehearsals, but as soon as the cameras started rolling, Lulu ran amok.

Despite Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and John Noakes trying to feed her buns, she lurched all over the set, defecated on the floor and trod on Noakes’s foot, who yelled out in pain and fell straight back into her steaming pile of dung.

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The show also had its fair share of scandals and controversies – it came out years later that its first dog Petra was actually an emergency replacement for the original dog who died of distemper two days after she first appeared on the show in 1962.

In her book, Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter revealed, “It was unthinkable to traumatise our youngest viewers by giving them the sad news, so we set off in the producer’s Mini to trawl London for the dead pup’s lookalike.

“We struck lucky in Lewisham. In a dingy shop window there was one small browny-black puppy, shivering in the corner of a pen. Not a single viewer spotted the swap.”

The much-cherished Petra died for real in 1977, and Blue Peter’s next famous pet was Shep, who joined in 1971 and lived with Noakes. The pair had a special bond but those limits were often tested, especially when the Yorkshireman had to wrestle the canine away from savaging a whirring radio-controlled model of R2D2 as it innocently rolled across the studio.

A few years later, despite Noakes regularly telling his excitable collie to, “Get Down Shep”, he nipped Record Breakers’ Roy Castle on the hand while the late entertainer demonstrated the art of spoon-playing. Clearly Shep was a music lover.

An entire generation of 1970s children also grew up thinking piranhas were going to be a much bigger problem in their lives than was necessary after Purves stood over a tank of the flesh-eating fish in the studio and terrified kids with the warning, “If I was to put my finger inside the tank, they’d bite it off.”

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As none of the animals who appeared on the show ever performed on time or as expected, the fish who, as Purves said, “Could strip a cow to a skeleton in a matter of minutes,” completely ignored the meat he dropped in the water and turned out to be vegetarians.

The longest serving pet on the programme, tortoise Fred who made his debut in 1963, was misgendered for the first four years of his life and turned out to be Freda. Sadly Freda died live on afternoon TV in 1972 when Noakes dragged post-hibernation out of her box and offered her some lettuce. Finding Freda unresponsive, Noakes gave her a cheery posthumous shake – before cameras realised what had happened and quickly panned away.

Quite rightly, concerns over animal welfare would prevent most of these animal bloopers from happening now. But only last year naturalist Steve Backshall catapulted a cage of cockroaches across the studio floor, and a shocked presenter Abby Cook had to hastily remind traumatised children watching, “They are incredibly robust, so they will be absolutely fine.”

During his time on the show in the late 80s, Mark Curry made so many mistakes, viewers were treated to a compilation of all his mishaps, including driving a mini steam engine straight into a set. Cooking demonstrations were also a rich source of mishap material as pancakes failed to toss every single year and bewitched blenders wouldn’t mix Halloween pumpkin tarts.

But perhaps the funniest seasonal butter fingers was 14 years ago when host Ayo Akinwolere dropped the Trafalgar tree star – and nearly ruined for the nation’s children.

There were also smutty slip-of the-tongues from 80s presenter Simon Groom which everyone hopes went over the heads of children. The master of the ad lib innuendo once described Durham Cathedral’s medieval door carvings as a “beautiful pair of knockers”. And after a piece on hedge maintenance, he quipped, “As long as you have a decent length to start with, well then you can manage a good lay.”

Some of the show’s stunts would be impossible to film now in our more risk-averse culture, but back then was known for some of TV’s most dangerous exploits.

In 1971, Girl Guides were invited for a singalong around the campfire, which they set fire to – inside the Blue Peter studio. After a few rousing choruses of, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” firemen had to rush in with extinguishers before they all burned to a cinder.

Plucky presenter Noakes climbed 170ft up Nelson’s Column, with no safety gear – and just a pair of flares and wobbly ladders between him and certain death – to clean pigeon droppings off the statue in 1977. Not once – but twice. Apparently the sound cut out at the top, and he had to climb up and do it all again.

There have been 43 presenters of the show over the years since it began in 1958, and for a squeaky clean kids show, some of them have been worse behaved than the animal guests.

Daredevil Noakes was replaced by Peter Duncan in 1980, who it was revealed had appeared nude in a “porn” film called The Lifetaker.

Despite the tabloid furore, he wasn’t sacked, and in 2014, Duncan even made a joke about it when he tweeted. “For your pleasure on my 60th a trailer from my 1973 'porn' film that caused trauma and headlines.”

Not so lucky to escape the axe, former presenter Richard Bacon was very publicly given the boot in 1998, aged 22, for taking cocaine in a London nightclub – just 20 months into his dream job.

Yesterday on social media Bacon expressed his shock at the demise of the live show, saying, “Being live is what made it alive. The elephant, the studio catching fire. The mistakes, the movement, the energy.”

And adds, with a hint of irony, “It was a magical experience (for, you know, all of 20 months).”

In what now sadly seems to have been a portent of its own doom, Blue Peter filmed a segment in 1976 about mobile phones and Lesley Judd introduced a “roving phone” with “absolutely no trailing cables of any kind” being carried like a handbag.

Sadly the invention did catch on… and 49 years later, the digital age has killed off the last live children’s TV show. Kids may have so many more choices to watch now but they will never be as funny.

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