A BLUE Peter report from Bradford Festival, a mass vaccination in a 1960s polio epidemic and a ‘thunderstorm census’ are among snippets of local life in archive television footage released by the BBC.

The broadcaster has opened up its collection of quirky news footage, much of it shot locally over several decades, and some of the films are being shown on the Telegraph & Argus website.

In a report first broadcast on June 20, 1994 the Blue Peter team of Diane-Louise Jordan, Tim Vincent and Anthea Turner visited the Bradford Festival. There is footage of street theatre in the city centre and at Thornton Grammar School, pupils are filmed taking part in a drumming workshop.

There’s also footage of the Mela at Lister Park and a carnival parade headed by a Chinese lion built by local artists and four huge puppets created by Bradford schoolchildren. The carnival features a ‘Hungry Caterpillar’ made up of youngsters, Allerton Middle School pupils carrying colourful model vegetables, and Lulu the elephant - a familiar sight at Bradford festivals over the years. Diane-Louise Jordan points out that Lulu shares a name with the elephant who famously soiled the studio while appearing on Blue Peter three decades earlier.

In another film, first broadcast on Tonight on October 23, 1961, reporter Fyfe Robertson visits Hull and asks whether lockdown is the answer for a polio outbreak. Fearing an epidemic, the local health committee mounted a “crash campaign to stop the outbreak in its tracks”. Queues are seen outside a clinic where 78,000 people were vaccinated in one day.

“People in other parts of the country tend to look upon Hull as a beleaguered city and a place to avoid,” reported Fyfe. “Indeed many people are avoiding it - football clubs have cancelled fixtures here and there have even been cases of travelling salesmen from Hull refused admission by clients.”

With similarities to the present, the Medical Officer was criticised for “not closing cinemas, swimming pools and public functions”.

Fyfe Robertson visited Huddersfield for another Tonight film, on November 5, 1964, to investigate a ‘Thunderstorm Census’. In a quiet suburban house he found detailed handwritten records of almost every thunderstorm of the past 40 years.

In other films released by the BBC archive, Newby First School in West Bowling appears on Nationwide holding lessons in a cramped sports centre, Margaret Drabble explores Haworth’s Bronte Parsonage and three Bradford inventors reveal, Dragon Den-style, their ‘hot air bed’.

* To view the films go to