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Fundamentally what was at the heart of what happened to me was a betrayal.
That was the most difficult thing to deal with was the fact that a best friend had betrayed me and...
...sold my story to a newspaper.
Well being a Blue Peter presenter meant an awful lot to me at the time. It was tremendously exciting. It really was.
When they told me I'd got the job it was, um, surreal, strange.
I remember ringing my mum and she screamed and I think she then rang my dad and he screamed.
It was one of those moments.
You know to me as a 20 year old, 21 year old, it was like... winning the X Factor or something.
- I'm ready for my conker challenge! - To the start please! Off you go! Good luck!
And here to ensure that fair play is seen at all times, is Miss Hannigan herself.
-Get out! -Right.
My sacking from Blue Peter coincided with the er, the 40th anniversary of the show,
which was taking place at the Natural History Museum.
And when I came outside there were lots of photographers there waiting for me.
And there were lots of other presenters there who were better known, but the photographers only focused on me.
And so alarm bells started to ring, that's unnatural.
And so I rang my agent first thing the next morning, and he said, right, something's up here.
Er that weekend I'd long had planned a bit of a paint and decoration job on my flat.
So my dad and I went to Homebase, picking some paint for the flat. If memory serves it was 'Midnight Mist'.
And I was holding this can of paint, about to pay for it, and the phone went, and it was my PR guy.
And he said, Richard, it's News of the World - '***', and lots of it.
Um, and as you can imagine, that's a pretty tough line to hear with my dad next to me.
Um, and er by 'lots of it', that sounds like he meant lots of ***.
He actually meant lots of coverage, which he was quite right about.
And I said, look Dad, there's gonna be a story about me in the News of the World tomorrow,
and it's about me taking, um, an illegal drug.
And he said, right. And looked very serious.
And I said, I think it will probably have an impact on my job.
I knew in that instant that I was gonna lose my job on Blue Peter, that it's - that's untenable.
You can't carry on as a Blue Peter presenter, of ALL shows, even compared to other kids shows,
you can't carry on if you've taken a drug like that.
The Head of Children's Programmes at the BBC went on television today to tell young Blue Peter viewers
why Richard Bacon won't be presenting the programme anymore.
She said Bacon who was sacked yesterday for taking *** had let them all down, badly.
The genesis of the story involved my best friend at the time going to Max Clifford and then he went to the
News of the World and they recorded a phone conversation where my friend rang me up and
he'd been on this night out with me where we'd taken ***, and he rang me and rehearsed the details of it
and said 'Hey Richard, that was a big night!' and I kinda went, 'Yeah, gosh yeah, we had so much coke.'
And that became the evidence that they used.
When those photographers started following me before I knew what the story was, I was scared.
Then when I had it confirmed that I was gonna be in the News of the World, and the subject of this scandal,
um, I was really scared. And of course I had to tell my parents
so you go from fear to a certain shame and apprehension.
In fact, if you like, all three of those mixed together.
Inside my head I think I managed to keep a sense of realism about what was happening.
I knew it was a bit silly what was happening. And I knew that I was the subject of some stories that weren't true...
...and that that would happen.
One of the frustrating things about the experience that I had, which is that...
something bad happened that everyone was talking about and there's nothing you can do about it,
and you can't stop everyone else talking about it, and columnists writing about it,
all you can do is just let it happen. And then when it's calmed down you try and find a way back.
How can I... how can I rebuild?
You can feel completely defeated by something,
and if you feel completely defeated by something then you might give up.
Or you can say, this has happened, but what can I do to repair the damage? And that was the view that I took.
Streaky Bacon! Yesssss!!!!!
After 3 months I got a job on The Big Breakfast doing their outside broadcasts,
which was travelling the country and knocking on people's doors and doing stunts and sketches.
And you wouldn't recommend this to anyone on Blue Peter right now...
because what I did was-was dangerous, and...um...er and embarrassing.
But there's also another reality to it which is that it did help me get other work.
Without that scandal then The Big Breakfast wouldn't have been interested in me.
They were interested in me, even three months later.
Letting down your parents badly, to-to really fundamentally pull that rug away and disappoint them and...
embarrass them was the hardest thing of all, much harder than losing my job, much harder than losing my income,
much harder than the-the ridicule that followed from the columnists in the newspapers. It was...
the damage that I'd done to them and the impact that I knew it would have on them personally, and on their lives.
Failure can be a positive thing because of what you learn out of adverse circumstances,
and I'd had quite a charmed life up till then...
And actually something terrible, something bad happening to me, knocked away my naive edge, if you like,
and it gave me a cynicism.
I suppose the danger is, when something weird, and it is weird, like that happens is that it
fundamentally changes you and your approach to people and friends.
And I'm glad to say it didn't. And I think in some ways you have to be realistic. You have to know that, actually,
um, most people aren't like that.
So it didn't fundamentally affect my relationships with other people, how much I trust other people.
It just made me ask a couple of more questions and made me a bit more cautious.
It's one thing saying it and it's another thing doing it, but you really have to try and stand back from the situation.
It's the only way to get a realistic perspective on it.
Don't panic. Don't listen to the most pessimistic voices.
Because when you're in the moment, you'll react emotionally to something.
You need to somehow find a way of almost stepping out of the situation and ...
looking at in the third person and observing it.
And if you can do that with a calm, cool, rational head,
even in the eye of the storm, then you'll probably find a way out.
But you know, it's easier said than done.
But situations are rarely as good as they seem and rarely as bad as they seem.