John Noakes, the amenable presenter of the classic UK children’s show Blue Peter who died earlier this week, has the unlikeliest of fans—British mega-artist Damien Hirst. In a BBC broadcast available online, Hirst explains that a 1975 episode of Blue Peter inspired him to become an artist. In the 1970s snippet, Noakes explains how to make and use a spinning picture painter, a rather basic machine for people “who like to paint but never know what to draw”. He splashes a few daubs of paint on some paper, spins the machine and produces a “Noakes masterpiece” (which looks incidentally just like a Hirst painting in miniature). “I remember thinking that’s fun whereas art is something more serious. As I got older, I started thinking about Van Gogh…. And I thought why does it have to be like that? The better art is the art made on the spin machine,” Hirst says on the BBC report.
