Lorraine Heggessey involved in the dismissal of "Blue Peter" presenter Richard Bacon. In October 1998, the "News of the World" newspaper revealed that Bacon had taken cocaine, and he was subsequently sacked from his job as a presenter on the high-profile children's programme. Heggessey appeared on-screen in a specially-recorded one-minute address to viewers shown directly before the first episode of "Blue Peter" to be screened following Bacon's sacking, on 19 October 1998, to explain to young viewers why Bacon had been dismissed, claiming that he had "not only let himself and the team on "Blue Peter" down, but he has also let
Prenatal cocaine exposure national scare" and were given less attention. Ideas about severe effects of PCE may have been more readily embraced because they "fit in with cultural stereotypes". At the time, the proposed mechanism by which cocaine harmed fetuses was as a stimulant—it was predicted that cocaine would disrupt normal development of parts of the brain that dealt with stimulation, resulting in problems like bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder. Reports from the mid-1980s to early 90s raised concerns about links between PCE and slowed growth, deformed limbs, defects of the kidneys and genitourinary and gastrointestinal systems, neurological damage, small head size,