Peter Purves speaks with a knowledge and passion for dogs that comes with having worked with them professionally for more than 40 years and having had many as pets.
Yet Peter, who was an actor in Doctor Who before he started work on BBC’s Blue Peter, recalls that he wasn’t really a dog person until he joined the children’s programme. There, he was famously teamed up with Petra, a five-year-old border collie/German shepherd cross.
“She’d been brought into the programme as a surrogate pet for the nation – it was a brilliant idea. That was before I joined the show, so she’d been on the show for five years when I joined,” Peter recalls.
“But she never really liked the studio very much and the editor Biddy Baxter, whose idea it had been in the first place, after I’d been on the show for about three or four months said: ‘Look, Petra seems to like being with you on the set, she doesn’t seem to mind that too much, would you like to take her on as your pet?’
“Well, I had to think about it. As an actor you can’t have a pet because you can’t give them the time. It’s very unfair. If you can’t give a dog lots of time, then you shouldn’t have one.
“But then suddenly there was this option of having a dog at home which came to work with me, because she came to the studio every day, and if I was going filming in the UK she used to come with me – so it was very practical. And so that’s how I took her on.”
Peter and Petra were together for 10 years. Petra died in 1977 and today a bronze statue of her stands outside BBC’s MediaCityUK at Salford.
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