‘I’ve never been afraid to say what I think’: Janet Ellis on atheism, grief, and the life behind Blue Peter | television

CAnnette Ellis is exactly as you might remember her from her days as a Blue Peter presenter: impish movements, lively eyes and a piercing side that could smell bullshit a mile away but wouldn’t be rude to mention. She lives in London with her 21-year-old grandson and a cute Italian girl named Angela, who follows her everywhere. The dog is a surprise, it is the size of a horse. It adds an element of fairytale danger to the scene, as you watch them walk down the stairs and think, “What happens the day Angela decides to go a little faster?”

Ellis, 70, will become the next president of Humanists UK at the start of 2026, succeeding geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford. She supports the group’s campaigns – for secular schools and assisted dying laws. More broadly, she says she was “always amazed” by the city’s “persistent calm” – a harbor of irreligious morality in stormy times. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve found the idea of ​​prioritizing what comes next over this part a really strange concept. Everything begins and ends in our minds.”

It is a difficult time to take on this role, with increasing political polarization and US battles imported into the UK through the money of evangelical Christian billionaires. Being on the front lines demanding abortion access, for example, is now more vulnerable. “I’ve never been afraid to say what I think,” she says lightly. “The reassuring thing is that as you get older, it gets easier.” Just because you’ve made your name as a children’s TV presenter, with an endless supply of sticky-backed plastic and stuff you’ve made previously, doesn’t mean you’re without merit.

Ellis was born in 1955 in Kent. Her father served in the army until she was fourteen, after which he joined a model-making company. She left school at 17 to go to what was then known as the Central Training School for Speech and Dramatic Arts, and got her first job three weeks after graduating – a small theater part in which she spent most of her time on stage as a potter.

Her dream was to become a theater actress. “TV in those days was a little bit like, ‘Okay, if I have to,’” she says. At 22, she landed a role in four episodes of Doctor Who, and soon after began working as a presenter on the children’s show Jigsaw, and then, at 23, she became pregnant with the eldest of her three children, Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Having a child was an unusual move for a young creative in a hurry, given that second-wave feminism was well advanced in the late 1970s. “I guess I just thought, ‘This looks easy,'” she says. Motherhood was there, but staying married was not. When Sophie was 29, Alice had just arrived at Blue Peter, and then divorced. “My career would have been over if there had been any publicity around it,” she says, “but I wasn’t at age

“Obviously what I did initially to get famous was a show that had its own reputation, very clean living, very straight, very nice, but that was fine. I knew what I was like on the outside. It’s like your child at home isn’t necessarily the same as your child at school. I can always split the two.”

Every moment of the “Blue Peter” years (1983 to 1987) was seared into the consciousness of my generation – the pets, the Blue Peter garden, the decals, the craft projects. You would never have guessed that Ellis never intended to become a TV presenter. In fact, she says, “When my agent first said, ‘How about applying?’ I found it to be a really terrible proposition, because obviously [she gestures with both arms in the opposite direction] The Royal Shakespeare Company goes like this. At the same time, she was a single mother: “If you were set on an assignment at first – you’d have to get divorced, with a high-profile role on a squeaky kids’ show – you’d think, ‘This is going to be really hard.’ But I had to do it. My main thought was that I hoped I’d meet someone else, and I hoped it would be OK with a kid.

She met John Leach, a television producer, in her third year at Blue Peter – he was a friend of a friend. They got very drunk on the night she was supposed to memorize her script, but she managed it anyway, and then she called him and asked him out to the movies. He played hard to get and said he saw everything that happened. “We ended up going to aliens,” she says. She could do any night except Wednesday, because that was her other text evening, and that was the only night he could do it. However, they married in 1988, had two children – Jack and Martha – and were a legendary happy couple. Why he played hard to get is lost to history.

When Ellis left Blue Peter in 1989, there were rumors that she had been fired because she was pregnant with their son, but that was not the case. “It was just the idea of ​​trying to do this with a child,” she says. “And when I said I wouldn’t come back after I had him, no one said, ‘Oh.’ please’. “I wasn’t sacked, I actually sacked myself.”

Three years after Martha’s birth, she presented the BBC’s Open Air magazine programme, and wrote a non-fiction book, How to Get Married Without Divorcing Your Family, with fellow Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating.

Leach died in 2020, when he was 63, two and a half years after being diagnosed with tonsil cancer. “He was exceptional,” she says. “The funniest person I ever met. A wonderful stepfather to Soph; he took over without checking him at all, and he was very close to her. She came with us for our honeymoon. He was strong and intelligent and had never made a single enemy or anything like that, either professionally or personally, in his life. “He was a quiet man, and when they used to go out, he would come home saying: ‘Do you think I’ve said enough?’

“It was ridiculous that he died so young,” she says. It was a very tough time to have terminal cancer, in the middle of a pandemic, when going to the hospital was too dangerous. “Soon after that, there was no room in the hostel – they were prioritizing Covid. I have absolutely no idea, and for me it’s not worth examining what would have happened with his treatment if the pandemic had not happened, because it did. It’s funny, isn’t it. I never thought I would be able to talk about it without crying, but here we are.” It’s very moving to hear her talk about John. Even Angela the dog looks like she’s about to start crying. With wistful insistence, as if Ellis were at the behest of a director to lighten the mood, she says: “It was a godsend that the weather was perfect. We sat in the garden for months. All we really wanted was to be together.”

She regrets that John did not live to see how Covid ended. “I felt really cheated for him.” And they had to hold his funeral while the restrictions continued. “We could have 15 people – and you know, Soph has five kids, and he pretty much did it.”

During this period, Ellis-Bextor has been the soundtrack and mascot of the pandemic, broadcasting the Kitchen Disco from her home 10 minutes from Ellis’s, complete with glitter balls, stilettos, and kids of all ages (her youngest was a toddler at the time — he’s now 6). It was no secret that John was dying, and Ellis now makes no secret of her deep grief, but the whole family takes this responsibility to maintain joy incredibly seriously.

The loss of her husband is the only thing that shakes Janet Ellis’ agnosticism. “If there’s anything that challenges it, it’s the hope of seeing someone again. But I’ll never see him again…I find it really comforting that we had a good time.” here. “I’m not waiting for anything else.”

When she accepted the role at Humanists UK, she said to Andrew Copson, the chief executive: “Oh my God, do I have to stop saying ‘Oh my God?’” And he said: “No, that’s fine.” Just try not to.” It’s hard to imagine anyone who wouldn’t forgive him for that.