After Blue Peter
In 1979, Noakes wrote a children's book, The Flight of the Magic Clog (published by Lion, with illustrations by Toni Goffe) in which Mr. Brooks takes John, Mickey the brainy one, June the talkative one, Barbara the pretty one and Eric the clumsy one on an adventure against the international villain Baron Wilhelm Doppleganger and his secret arms factory using a giant magic flying clog.
In 1982, he and his wife made an unsuccessful attempt to sail around the world. A second attempt in 1984 got no further than Majorca, where they settled down to run a boat rental business. In 1983 Noakes presented The Dinosaur Trail, a 7-part documentary for Children's ITV.
Between 1986 and 1988, the BBC produced a programme called Fax!, which answered questions posed by viewers. One question was "Whatever happened to John Noakes and Shep?" Noakes and his wife appeared on the show on 20 January 1987 to reveal what he had been doing since retiring from television, and during the course of the interview, Noakes tearfully revealed that Shep had died just three days previously.
Notwithstanding his status as an icon for a whole generation, Noakes has become publicly bitter about his Blue Peter experiences. Despite having come across as a very natural presenter, he claimed his television personality was a fake, and he was merely acting a role. He also complained about his perceived low salary during his time on Blue Peter, and expressed disgust that he had apparently never been insured for any of the stunts he had undertaken, claiming that he would never have gone through with them had he been aware of this at the time. The Singleton/Noakes/Purves team was reunited in October 1998 for a programme celebrating 40 years of Blue Peter and again in January 2000 for the disinterment of the time capsule that they had buried in 1971.
In 2003, Noakes co-hosted an ITV1 series entitled Mad About Pets and in 2004, he took part in the Living TV reality TV show I'm Famous and Frightened!. A year later, he appeared in the Channel 5 programme Britain's Worst Celebrity Driver.
On 14 June 2008, he appeared in a Blue Peter-themed edition of the Weakest Link, being voted off second. It was noted that when the presenter Anne Robinson spoke about Shep he became visibly upset and could not hold back the tears trying to answer the question.
He is now a language tutor, specialising in Romance languages. He is trained in the Michel Thomas method of language tuition.
Read more about this topic: John Noakes