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This week, the BBC announced the latest Blue Peter presenter – wheelchair racer Abby Cook – making her the 42nd presenter in the 65-year history of this wholesome children’s entertainment show.

Blue Peter is famous for being the longest-running children’s TV programme in the world, as well as for its iconic badge, and its notoriously disastrous time capsules.

But in amongst the strange craft projects, ‘fun’ facts and sometimes controversial competitions, Blue Peter had some real geek gems:

Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill Met a Tortoise and Ate Star Wars Stew (1980)

Through a 2023 lens, this seems like a fever dream, but against the odds it all actually happened. To celebrate the release of The Empire Strikes Back, the Blue Peter team treated us to an appearance from R2D2, a strangely silent C3P0, ‘hairy old Chewbacca’ and Darth Vader.

Then the real fun happens: Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill...

Forget the Countdown teapot or the Pointless Trophy. The most coveted prize on UK television has four wheels, an extendable handle and a quiff.

Since October 2019, Richard Osman’s House of Games has occasionally offered a wheelie suitcase among its selection of kitsch branded prizes. For context – whichever celebrity contestant wins that day’s episode has a choice of five rewards decorated with the face of host and creator Richard Osman. The prizes range from the glamorous (a decanter) to the practical (gardening gloves) to the playful (a dartboard) to the esoteric.

The greatest of these, and by far the most popular, is the wheelie suitcase. In the 430 or so episodes since its first appearance in October 2019, the luggage has been chosen by celebrity contestants 60 times out of a possible 86*. In other words, the baggage reclaim at Edinburgh airport around the time of the Fringe Festival is chock-a-block with them.

Brett Morgen’s intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity and unfailing charm

Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is a 140-minute shapeshifting epiphany-slash-freakout leading to the revelation that, yes, we’re lovers of David Bowie and that is that. It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

As a rock star, Bowie was a unique artist, aesthete, insurgent experimentalist, gender dissident and unrepentant, unselfconscious cigarette smoker. (I wonder if he ever gave that up?) Morgen includes the traditional student-poster gallery of the various icons to whom Bowie can be compared – Oscar Wilde, Buster Keaton, James Baldwin, Aleister Crowley – all perfectly allowable, but none of them quite approximate Bowie’s own sweetness and rock idealism.

Exclusive: Channel 4 has taken Avalon memory challenge format Can I Improve My Memory? to series and replaced presenter Michael Buerk with former The Great British Bake Off host Sandi Toksvig.

The show premiered as a 60-minute special in March 2019, with Buerk challenging celebrities Gok Wan, Joey Essex, and Valerie Singleton to study unlikely specialist subjects using memory hacks, before testing them on their new-found knowledge.

Avalon, the producer of Taskmaster and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, will now make a four-part series for next year, with Toksvig in the driving seat and a new group of stars competing across knockout episodes to be crowned the memory champion.

Can I Improve My Memory? is executive produced by Jamie Isaacs and series produced by Alice Wheater. Tim Hancock and Sarah Lazenby commissioned the series for Channel 4.

Toksvig is growing her slate of Channel 4 shows after leaving the Bake Off tent earlier this year.

Hanks plays the cherished Us children’s TV star Fred Rogers in this surprisingly moving drama about his transformative encounter with a hardbitten reporter

Has anyone in Britain ever heard of Fred Rogers? He was an American children’s TV presenter whose folksy show for toddlers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, ran from 1968 to 2001 and made him a national treasure in the Us, much admired for the way he encouraged children (and adults) to talk and think about their feelings. But unlike Sesame Street, it was not shown in the UK and so Rogers, played here with extraordinary Zen self-possession and force by Tom Hanks, may be unfamiliar. The equivalent would be showing Americans a biopic of Blue Peter’s John Noakes. (To cast this imaginary Bafta-winner, I suggest Jamie Bell as Noakes, Erin Doherty as Valerie Singleton, Daniel Radcliffe as Peter Purves and Meryl Streep as Biddy Baxter.

“Ealing Exquisiteness”

By Raymond Benson

Ealing Studios has a long history of greatness and is one of the finest motion picture studios in Great Britain. While it is most well known for its post-war comedies, several of which starred the inimitable Alec Guinness, the studio site has been active since the silent era. When producer Michael Balcon took it over in the late 1930s and renamed it Ealing, many successful pictures—both dramas and comedies—were made under its banner. Ealing is still operating today and is also the home of the Met Film School London.

The Lavender Hill Mob, released in 1951, is one of Ealing’s jewels in the crown, often cited as the best of the bunch. Director Crighton helmed several of the Ealing pictures, and, at age 77, was finally nominated for a Best Director Oscar for his work on A Fish Called Wanda in 1988 (it was because...

Here at Digital Spy, we're rather fond of The Great British Bake Off - so imagine our glee at hearing that the new series will have a sister show on BBC Two, An Extra Slice. But what we immediately began thinking about was who could host such a programme.

Instantly, we began thinking of people like Matt Baker and Jenny Eclair... but in our dreams, which other famous faces could take the reins for some baking banter? Read on for our 25 ever-so-serious suggestions.

1. Christopher Ecclescake

An adventure through glace and thyme.

2. Pasty Kensit

3. Greggs James

The Radio Bun DJ.

4. Tom Hiddlescone

Thanks to Twitter user @kay_way for this one!

5. Cheryl Roll

The Eggs Factor.

6. Danny Pie-r

Admittedly not our finest pun - we just really, really wanted to Photoshop a picture of Danny Dyer with a pie.

7. Flan Healy

Why does it always grain on me?

8. Brad Pitta

Bite Club.

Former Blue Peter presenter Valerie Singleton has joined critics of the BBC's decision to axe Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing. The 72-year-old broadcaster claimed that the corporation's bosses ignored Phillips's experience and expertise when they decided to drop her in favour of popstar Alesha Dixon, 30. Dixon, who won Strictly's fifth series in 2007, will now join Len Goodman, Craig Revel Horwood and Bruno Tonioli on the panel when the new series begins in the autumn. Speaking to the Daily Express, Singleton commented: "What a shame people can't just be judged these days for their abilities. (more)...

The great man himself Peter Purves has written a book - Here's One I Wrote Earlier. Set to be serialised in The Daily Mail, get set for revelations about the former Doctor Who and Blue Peter star's sexual liaisons throughout the 1960s and 1970s! I dare not speak any further, suffice to say that Mr Purves possibly had relations with the lovely Lesley Judd, not to mention coming clean about Valerie Singleton's revelation about her "Big Sexual Experience" with Peter. As for the...

Konnie Huq has denied saying that she used to steal sweets from Woolworths as a child. The television presenter reportedly told The Mirror last month that she has taken pick 'n' mix from the shop without paying, prompting fellow Blue Peter alumnus Valerie Singleton to criticise her in the Daily Express for condoning theft. However, Huq has denied both making the admission and any rift with (more)...

Valerie Singleton has confessed that she enjoyed a fling with Peter Purves in the 1960s. The Blue Peter presenters slept together in a hotel after spending a day filming in London. "He was lovely - warm, interesting and fun - and was between marriages," she told the Daily Mail. "We were on an assignment out of London - neither of us can remember quite where - and we had a (more)...