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Janet Ellis is exactly as you might remember her from her days as a Blue Peter presenter: elfin movements, lively eyes, a penetrating aspect that could smell bullshit a mile away but would never be so discourteous as to mention it. She lives in London with her 21-year-old grandson and a gentle Italian spinone called Angela, who follows her everywhere. The dog is a surprise, being the size of a horse. It adds an element of slightly fairytale jeopardy to the scene, as you watch them pad down the stairs and think, “What happens the day Angela decides to go a bit faster?”
Ellis, 70, will become the next president of Humanists UK at the start of 2026, taking over from the geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford. She supports the group’s campaigns – for secular schools and assisted dying laws. More broadly, she says she has “always been struck” by its “steady calmness” – a port of irreligious decency in stormy times. “Since I was a child, I’ve found the idea of prioritising what came next over this bit a really weird concept. Everything starts and finishes in our minds.”
It’s a tough time to be taking on the role, with politics increasingly polarised and US battles imported to the UK by evangelical Christian billionaire money. To be on the frontlines arguing for access to abortion, for instance, is now more exposing. “I’ve never been scared of saying what I think,” she says briskly. “The reassuring thing is, as you get older, it gets easier.” Just because you made your name as a children’s TV presenter, with an endless supply of sticky-backed plastic and things you made earlier, does not mean you’re without edge.
Ellis was born in 1955 in Kent. Her father served in the army until she was 14, after which he joined a model-making company. She left school at 17 to go to what was then the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, and landed her first job three weeks after graduating – a small theatre part in which she spent most of her time on stage as a plant pot.
Her dream was to make it as a theatre actor. “Telly in those days was a bit, ‘Well, if I have to,’” she says. At 22, she got a part appearing in four episodes of Doctor Who, shortly after started work as a presenter on the children’s show Jigsaw and then, at 23, became pregnant with the eldest of her three children, Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Having a baby was quite an unusual move for a young creative in a hurry, given that feminism’s second wave was well-advanced by the late 70s. “I think I just thought, ‘That looks easy,’” she says. Motherhood was, but staying married wasn’t. When she was 29, Sophie was four, and Ellis had just arrived on Blue Peter, she got divorced. It would have been career-ending had there been any publicity around it, “But I wasn’t in the age of X and Insta and paparazzi,” she says. “I established myself quite early on in my mind as somebody who was free to be.
“Obviously, what I initially did to become well-known was a programme that had its own reputation that was pretty clean-living, pretty upright, pretty nice, but that was fine. I knew what I was outside. It’s like your kid at home is not necessarily the same as your kid at school. I could always divide the two.”
Every moment of those Blue Peter years (1983 to 1987) seared itself into the consciousness of my generation – the pets, the Blue Peter garden, the badges, the craft projects. You never would have guessed that Elllis had never set out to be a TV presenter. In fact, she says, “When my agent first said, ‘What about presenting?’, I found it absolutely, outrageously awful as a suggestion, because obviously [she gestures with both arms in the opposite direction] the Royal Shakespeare Company is that way.” At the same time, she was a single parent: “If you’d been set it as a task at the outset – you’re going to have to get divorced, with a high-profile part in a squeaky clean children’s programme, you’d think, ‘That is going to be really hard’. But I just had to do it. My main thought was, I hoped I would meet somebody else, and I hoped it would be ok with a kid.”
She met John Leach, a television producer, in her third year at Blue Peter – he was a friend of a friend. They got mad drunk on a night she was supposed to memorise her script, she managed it anyway, then called him and asked him out to the cinema. He played hard to get and said he’d seen everything that was out. “We ended up having to go to Aliens,” she says. She could do any night except Wednesday, because that was her other script evening, and that was the only night he could do. Still, they married in 1988, had two children – Jack and Martha – and were a fabled happy couple. Why he played so hard to get is lost to history.
When Ellis left Blue Peter in 1989, there were rumours that she was fired because she was pregnant with her son, but that wasn’t it. “It was just the thought of trying to do it with a baby,” she says. “And when I said I wasn’t going to come back after having him, nobody went ‘Oh please’. I wasn’t sacked, I effectively sacked myself.”
After Martha was born, three years later, she presented the BBC magazine-format Open Air, and wrote a non-fiction book, How to Get Married without Divorcing Your Family, with fellow Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating.
Leach died in 2020, when he was 63, two and a half years since he’d been diagnosed with tonsil cancer. “He was extraordinary,” she says. “The funniest person I’ve ever met. A brilliant stepfather to Soph; he took it on without examining it at all, and he was really close to her. She came on honeymoon with us. He was solid and smart and he never made a single enemy or anything like it, either professionally or privately, in his life.” He was a quiet man, and when they used to go out, he’d come home saying, “Do you think I said enough?”
“It was ridiculous that he should die so young,” she says. It was an absolutely brutal time to have terminal cancer, right in the middle of the pandemic, when it was too dangerous to go into hospital. “Then a bit further along, there was no room at the inn – they were prioritising Covid. I have absolutely no idea, and to me it’s not worth examining, what would have happened with his treatment if the pandemic hadn’t happened, because it did. It’s funny, isn’t it. I never thought I’d be able to talk about it without crying, but here we are.” It’s terribly poignant to hear her talk about John. Even Angela the dog looks like she is about to start crying. With rueful determination, as if Ellis is on a director’s command to lighten the atmosphere, she says, “the godsend was, we had fantastic weather. We sat in the garden for months. And all we ever wanted, really, was to be together.”
She regrets that John didn’t live to see how Covid ended. “I felt really cheated for him.” And, that they had to hold his funeral with restrictions still in place. “We could have 15 people – and, you know, Soph’s got five kids, that pretty much did it.”
It was during this period that Ellis-Bextor was the soundtrack-cum-mascot of the pandemic, broadcasting Kitchen Disco from her home 10 minutes away from Ellis’s, complete with glitterball and platform heels and kids of all ages (her youngest was tiny then – he’s now six), mucking in. It wasn’t a secret that John was dying, and Ellis makes no secret now of her profound grief, but the entire family takes this responsibility to keep cheerful incredibly seriously.
Losing her husband is the only thing that’s ever wobbled Janet Ellis’s agnosticism. “If anything was going to challenge it, it would be the hope that you’d see someone again. But I’m not going to see him again … I genuinely find it comforting that we had a good time here. I’m not waiting for another bit.”
When she accepted the role at Humanists UK, she said to Andrew Copson, the chief executive, “‘Oh God, have I got to stop saying ‘Oh God?’” And he said, ‘No, it’s fine. Just try not to.’” It’s hard to imagine anyone who wouldn’t forgive it.
