I don't believe it. Rumour used to be she was living with Joan Armatrading. Love and Affection.
For his part Purves had a whale of a time, particularly off camera, getting smashed on duty free Jack Daniels with Noakes while filming in Morocco (“I was convinced the next day I was going to be fired”), knocking back homemade hooch in Norway and perusing sex shops in Copenhagen with the camera man. Oh, and flirting with Valerie Singleton, with whom he had a brief fling. Singleton revealed the affair in 2008, saying she liked “the pirate type. And men who give me what I call BSE – a big sexual experience.’”
‘To be honest I don’t know where TV’s place in society is anymore,’ says Purves, pictured on Blue Peter with Buttons the dog in 1975 Credit: BBC
Purves beams a bit at this, like a Cheshire cat. “To be fair it was only one night,” he says. “And there was never any sexual tension on screen. We’ve remained great friends. Although we also used to fall out all the time. Val was/is extremely high maintenance. She always expected people to do things for her. She’d be sitting in the studio writing letters and call an assistant to ‘get me an envelope’. Occasionally she would get under my skin. We were in Mexico once and we weren’t speaking. We only spoke to each other through John, I can’t remember why.”
