Richard Bacon, the British broadcaster, has stated that his dismissal from the children's program Blue Peter for cocaine use fundamentally altered the trajectory of his career for the better. Bacon, who was 21 when he joined Blue Peter in 1997, was fired less than two years later after being caught using cocaine. The News of the World published a story about the incident, timed to coincide with the show's 40th anniversary. The BBC announced his departure on October 19, 1998.
Reflecting on the scandal 28 years later, Bacon suggested that without this event, he might have ended up presenting a budget holiday show rather than achieving fame on Channel 4's Big Breakfast. "It's changed the whole course of my life," Bacon said in an interview on the podcast Tales From the Celebrity Trenches. "When I got thrown off that show, the Big Breakfast came calling. The host Johnny Vaughan had been to prison for dealing cocaine, so it just seemed like a natural home. It made mine look like nothing."
Elsewhere in the interview, Bacon humorously claimed that history should remember him as Britney Spears' first husband. He recounted an incident from 2002 when, after interviewing Spears following her breakup with Justin Timberlake, he brought a licensed vicar and proposed to the pop star as a joke. Spears played along, signing a mock marriage contract. Bacon stated that her security guard later tore up the document, but he quipped, "I don't think you get out of a marriage contract by tearing it up? I mean, we'd all like to get out contracts that way, wouldn't we? So, in strict legal terms, I was married to Britney Spears."
This anecdote resurfaced two years later, around the time Spears married Kevin Federline in 2004. Bacon retold his story on his Xfm radio show, jokingly referring to Spears as a bigamist. This led to news stories with headlines such as "Spears a Bigamist," featuring the NBC logo and claiming Spears was married to British radio presenter Richard Bacon. The full conversation with Jamie East can be found on the Tales From the Celebrity Trenches podcast.