Richard Bacon reveals one thing that would have made Blue Peter cocaine sacking ‘more frightening’

Richard Bacon has said his sacking from Blue Peter after admitting he’d taken cocaine would have been ‘more frightening’ if it had played out on social media.

The TV presenter was notoriously sacked from the show in 1998 when he confessed to taking the Class A drug during a 12-hour drinking binge.

‘My experience on Blue Peter would have been very different if social media had been around,’ Richard said.

‘The intensity of the storm is even more fierce and more frightening now.

‘If you’re caught up in a massive scandal there are probably tens of thousands of tweets about you.’

Richard added that he wants to make a show about people who were cancelled and debate whether it was right or wrong.

He continued to The Sun: ‘Cancel culture is about rushing to judgment. I’d love us all to slow down, go, “Stop, let’s think about this. Does this person really deserve never to have a career?”’

Earlier this year, Richard denied snorting cocaine off a Blue Peter tortoise as he made an appearance on Unforgivable, hosted by Mel Giedroyc and Lou Sanders.

Addressing the scandal, he said: ‘I got fired for punctuality because if you take a lot of coke you’re always late.’

Mel then recalled a famous urban legend that did the rounds on Twitter a few years ago, from someone who claimed Richard snorted the A-class drug off one of the Blue Peter tortoises.

‘Do you remember Fred and Frieda the tortoises? Big white lines,’ she probed.

Richard shut down all speculation that he used actual tortoises as a prop to snort coke from.

‘I didn’t give any tortoises coke,’ he stressed. ‘So I got fired for taking drugs.’

At the time of Richard’s highly publicised sacking, head of the BBC Children’s Programming, Lorraine Heggessy said: ‘It is sad that such a talented presenter as Richard Bacon has not only let himself and his colleagues down but, most important of all, he has let down the millions of children who watch Blue Peter.’

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