Richard Bacon has opened up on the “shame” of the drugs scandal that brought an end to his time as a presenter on Blue Peter.
The broadcaster hosted the long-running BBC children’s programme for nearly two years, from 1997 to October 1998, when he was fired following a report in the News of the World that he had used cocaine.
Bacon, now 50, reflected on the incident in a interview with Elizabeth Day on the How to Fail podcast, revealing his parents’ distraught reaction when the scandal first broke.
“Well, the biggest shame about it is, some time later, I don't know how much time later, my mum told me it was the only time that she'd heard my dad cry, ever,” he revealed. “He's just from that generation that doesn't. His own dad came out of World War 2 and didn't show emotion.”
He said that the day after the story broke, his father, a criminal defence lawyer, “went into the shower to cry” before work.
“He turned on the shower, so that [mum] wouldn't hear him cry. He didn't want her to know,” he said. “She didn't tell me at the time. She left it quite a while to be honest.
“Even to this day, she said, ‘It's the only time I've ever heard him cry.’ So when she told me that story, I felt a deep sense of shame.”
When he departed the show, Bacon became the only Blue Peter presenter in the course of the show’s decades-long history to depart midway through a series.
“I did 20 months on Blue Peter, pretty much the same amount of time that Keir Starmer was Prime Minister,” he joked.
At the time, Blue Peter had been on air for nearly four decades, with the children’s series having debuted on BBC1 in 1958. As of 2026, new episodes of the show still air on CBBC, hosted by Abby Cook, Shini Muthukrishnan, and the puppet Hacker T Dog.
Bacon’s career ultimately survived the scandal, and the Nottinghamshire-born presenter went on to host series including The Big Breakfast and Top of the Pops.
Speaking on the podcast, he explained that he had not been a regular cocaine user when the scandal broke – but had tried it before.
“You would see other people get caught up in that and they would always say, ‘I didn't do that... it was my first time,’ and I would be like, ‘Really? The first time you did it happened to be the time you got caught?’
“Obviously I shouldn't have done that,” he continued. “Blue Peter was such a big opportunity and I loved the job and I still really respect it as a programme... It was an incredible job to have at age 21, 22.”
