IN MY defence I do wait at least 15 minutes – OK, maybe 13 – before I bring up (ahem) the subject of sex with Janet Ellis. It is late afternoon and we are sitting in the rather swish London house that Ellis shares with her husband John and there is no one else here, apart from the family’s huge galumphing Italian gun dog. “So Janet,” I say. “About these sex scenes in your book …”
I don’t really need to make any introductions, do I? Janet Ellis is a wife
(two times over; her husband John is from Huddersfield and produces TV for a living), mother (three times over), a pop star’s mother to boot (her eldest is Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who gave us Groovejet and Murder on the Dancefloor; you’ll be humming that all day now), a grandmother, an actress (maybe you caught her at the Edinburgh Fringe in a Lynne Truss play in 2012 or on telly in the odd episode of Doctor Who or The Sweeney back at the start of the 1980s), a TV presenter (she is not only Blue Peter class of 1987 but she’s been a regular on The Wright Stuff for years) and, oh yes, a one-time fiftysomething nude pin-up.
But her latest role is the one she’s been wanting for perhaps the longest. As of this month, and at the age of 60, Janet Ellis can now call herself a writer. Her first book, The Butcher’s Hook – the first in a six-figure two-book deal; that might mean she was paid £1,000.99 for them but I’m doubtful – is now in print.
A historical novel set in Georgian London, it is told from the point of a rather wayward 19-year-old girl called Anne and it is full of blood and guts and raised skirts. In short, it is possibly not the kind of thing you might expect from former Blue Peter presenters.
Indeed, as early as page 26 you will encounter what Ellis herself describes as an “inappropriate sex act”. By which time you will know that we’re not in the Blue Peter studio any more, Toto.
Over tea and cake that she’s bought in just for me, Ellis is, she admits, a little self-conscious about the idea that people are going to read the book’s more heated moments. “Because I’ve read so many bad sex scenes,” she says. “When you’re reading them there is nothing that removes you from the action more quickly than knowing the writer found that a struggle. ‘Oh God, is that really what you meant to say?’” Literary coitus interruptus, you might say.

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She says she is ready for any “Blue Peter presenter in sex shocker” headlines in the tabloids if they come along. But, truth is, Ellis is anything but flippant about her writing and that includes writing about her character’s first sexual experiences, the “physical incongruity” of that. “The way that everything is suddenly hyperreal,” Ellis says. “Even someone unbuttoning something. ‘Oh, you’re doing that.’ It just seems so out of context, like you’re suddenly giants in a very small bed. The first few times – as far as I can remember – you’re self-conscious about everything, absolutely everything. So that was the thing I wanted to get across.”
The sweet seriousness of that answer – and maybe the casual offhand grace of its imagery – may tell you why Ellis can now be described as an author.
How does it sound to be called a writer, Janet? “It sounds both absolutely extraordinary and just right, I would say.”
It has taken her a long time to get to this point. Fear and maybe a little bit of laziness kept her from finishing any of the four or five novels she started before. But when a three-month creative writing course snagged her an agent she turned 6,000 words into 80,000 in five months or so just to give him a book to try to sell.
Her agent then submitted the novel anonymously. “I’m not super mega famous,” she admits. “On the other hand things I’ve done in the past have a certain colour and flavour. I’ve enjoyed them all hugely. But the book isn’t necessarily representative of that.
“Also it gave me two cracks of the whip, let’s be honest, if it didn’t work.” It did, however, and now she is working away on novel number two.
It’s a nervous time, right now. Before the reviews start coming in, before people start reading the book, before they go “my goodness, a Blue Peter presenter wrote this? But it’s full of sex and violence.”
She hopes readers will get beyond that.
“If someone in the future picks up my book and doesn’t know anything else apart from the title and reads and enjoys it I can’t think of anything nicer. Because books have sustained me so much over the years.”

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That said, it may take some time before she totally shakes off the Blue Peter presenter tag. Mention her name and that’s what people will recognise her for. And she’s not been on the programme for almost three decades; a sign of the programme’s hold on the public imagination even now when it’s been consigned to the CBBC channel. (“I’m sad it’s gone digital,” she says. “I hope people still find it.”)
Thing is, she didn’t even want to be a presenter. An army brat, Ellis had “from the year dot”  wanted to be an actress. She went to drama school, trod the boards at various regional theatres, got the odd telly bit part then spent four years on a children’s TV arts show called Jigsaw (people of a certain age may remember Noseybonk; nervous people of a certain age may still be having nightmares about Noseybonk).
“Because in Jigsaw we did bits to camera people used to say, ‘You should be a presenter.’ I found that very insulting.
An agent said to me, ‘Sarah Greene is leaving Blue Peter and you should go for the audition.’”
The jobs of actor and Blue Peter presenter weren’t so very far apart really. It was live. You had to learn your lines. And so she went for the audition, was offered the job by Blue Peter’s grand and maybe slightly scary producer Biddy Baxter after she told Baxter ITV had offered her a job with Blue Peter’s competitor. Next thing she knew she was jumping from out of an RAF aeroplane. Why exactly, Janet? “I thought, ‘God, that is something I absolutely can’t imagine doing in a million years. I might as well.’ If it had been something I knew I wouldn’t like … I’m not great with heights. I’ve never been in our loft here because I don’t like ladders at all.”
Hold on. You are afraid of heights and yet you agreed to jump out of a plane? “But if you jump out of a plane you’re not related to the ground at all.”
That was the great thing about it, she says. The girls were just as likely to do the daredevil stuff as the boys. “There was no sexism there.”
Admittedly when Ellis did jump out of the plane she broke her pelvis on landing but never mind, she’s proud she did it. “However bad I was hurt even now I think, ‘Blimey, I did that. Wow. Well done, me.’”
In a way she seems an obvious Blue Peter presenter. She’s BBC English in human form (but with added warmth, to be fair). She was – still is – pretty, well mannered, well spoken, upper-middle class probably (when Groovejet went to No1 her daughter was competing with Spice Girl Victoria Beckham for the top spot; a chart fight described as “posh versus posher”).
So maybe that’s why there remains a slight frisson of scandal over the fact she became the programme’s first unmarried pregnant presenter. People have got that wrong though, she says. Baxter did not, as some “insiders” have claimed, rush on to the set after it was announced and lambast Ellis. The truth is Baxter already knew. “Nothing went out unscripted on that show,” Ellis points out.
“John and I had not been together very long and his mum didn’t know and viewing figures had spiked in Huddersfield since he got together with me so he had to leap suddenly on the train to go home to his startled mother just so he could tell her slightly in advance of the viewing public finding out.”
She’s always a bit bemused that people think she was sacked because she was pregnant and unmarried. After all, her pregnancy was announced in January 1987, she was on the programme until June and her son Jack was born in the August. “So the whole of that season I was getting rapidly pregnanter. You can’t disguise that, can you?”
She doesn’t know if she would have been offered another contract but it had been hard enough to do the programme with a young daughter (Sophie). The prospect of doing it with a baby as well was a bit too much for her and she departed, although the association with the programme never goes away.
“As a Blue Peter presenter you represent everything that every other girl has ever done. People say, ‘Oh, I remember when you were on the programme and you were pregnant and you had your scan.’ ‘That was Tina, actually.’ There’s a kind of conglomerate image of us.”
But that’s good, I tell her. It means she might still have influence. The thing is, Janet, I wrote a letter back in about 1973 to Peter Purves, John Noakes and Valerie Singleton and I got a letter back promising me a Blue Peter badge. But I never got it. My sister got one and she lost it straight away. I wouldn’t have lost it. Can you put a word in for me, Janet?
“I haven’t got a gold one and that still rankles,” she points out. “You can still get that badge. You’re still due one.”
There you go. If Biddy Baxter is reading this, Janet Ellis says I’m owed a Blue
Peter badge. You can send it care of The Herald Magazine.

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Janet is not a name any girls get called these days, Janet Ellis tells me. “You’re never going to bend over a pram and that’s the answer to ‘What’s your baby called?’”
My sister is called Janet, Janet. “What age is she?” Late forties. “Well, she’s already the youngest Janet I know. Every Janet I know is in their fifties or sixties.”
Still, she likes her moniker. “It’s one of those names that doesn’t have a particular resonance. It’s not one of those names that meant you had to be brilliant at maths or super fast on the hockey field. There’s a lot of room within it.”
It certainly suits her. Maybe it always did. She wasn’t hugely rebellious as a teenager, she says. Then again, she adds, “I was certainly going out with young men earlier than my kids were. From when I was 14.”

What would have been a typical date? “Wimpy bars. When I was 15 I went to a bistro in Richmond with a boy from sixth form. The meal came to over £10 and I remember feeling light-headed with worry about how expensive it was.”
She met Sophie’s dad when she was 16. They married when she was 21, but divorced a few years later. Was she in retrospect too young to get married? “Well, my 21-year-old self would still say no. I’m not a person who regrets. It’s not in my nature. And obviously we have Sophie and because she has four of her own I see a lot of him and that’s a nicer result than most people’s divorces.
“But, yeah, of course, we were [too young] and the thing everybody said was, ‘Be careful because you do a lot of growing up in your twenties and if you’re lucky you’ll grow together.’ And we didn’t. We grew apart. So predictable. But I would do it again because you do and because there is a way that you have to be unhappy sometimes. You can’t make it all right all the time.”
I fear Ellis knows that all too well. After the birth of her third child, Martha, she got it into her head that she would like a fourth. In the years that followed she suffered 10 miscarriages. “I’d had children easily before. When I had the first miscarriage I thought, ‘Well, statistically there it is.’ Second one, ‘Well, that’s unfortunate.’ By three you become medicalised. They go, ‘Recurrent miscarriage.’ But they never found a reason for it.
“Everybody has their own way of dealing with it and I would not begin to instruct anyone about it at all but certainly for me the only way to deal with it was to make it part of my life but not my life. I had a young family. I didn’t want them to lose their childhood. I certainly didn’t want my daughters to confuse the idea of having children with difficulty and pain.”
Still, it must have been painful to deal with. “I wouldn’t take too kindly to being comforted with the fact I had other children because as anyone who has had a miscarriage will tell you, the child you are pregnant with is the child you are thinking about.”
They stopped when nature decided she couldn’t get pregnant again, she says. And she was OK with that. Did that time have a cost, though, I have to ask?
“I guess. But the fallout that I would fear – that I would either not cope and become withdrawn, or that John and I would struggle because of it – didn’t happen. He was, as ever, quietly supportive. There was no tally for either of us.
“Occasionally I meet someone who I know was pregnant at the same time and the child by now would be at university or whatever and I think of that. But it isn’t turbulent. It’s not pleasant but it’s not a thing I find too difficult to discuss or I’m tortured with what-ifs about.”

She had a big party for her 60th last year. The Feeling played. Well, presumably that’s an easy booking when your daughter is married to the bass player. “The nice thing with age is the calmness that comes with it,” she says.
Were you not calm before? “No, but I think you’re encouraged not to be. You’re encouraged to think, ‘Time’s running out. Where are you going to go? What are you going to get?’
“I had this weird thing. ‘Just write the book.’ I’ve done that now. It’s fine. We can relax now. I’m sure that gallops up again in 10 years’ time. Seventy is a different realm and I’m perfectly aware of that. It’s not like I think age is just a number. It’s a number with a huge heft. But for me the nice things are I’ve managed to keep the same friends. I like my children. My grandchildren are enormously appealing.”

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She does know how to celebrate birthdays. When she was 52, after all, she decided to pose nude for a photoshoot for the charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). “I thought I might as well. They’re not going to make me look crap, are they? They’re not going to publish it if it does.”
What she remembers of the day is not any sense of fear. “Although we’re talking about a tiny little studio there is a moment when you have to be naked and everybody else in there has got their clothes on. And there is a moment of thinking that actually this is an amazingly powerful thing. How ridiculous.”
Back to sex again. This is where we came in. I leave Janet Ellis to get on with writing her second novel. I’m expecting my Blue Peter badge to arrive any day now.

The Butcher’s Hook by Janet Ellis is published by Two Roads, priced £14.99. She is appearing at Aye Write! on March 12. Visit ayewrite.com.