Tina Heath

Tina Heath is a British actress and former television presenter. Her first TV appearance came in 1969, when she appeared in Broaden Your Mind on BBC Two alongside Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. A one-off appearance in Z-Cars followed in 1970. In 1973, she played the title role in the popular children's television serial Lizzie Dripping after first playing the character in an episode of Jackanory Playhouse in 1972; her character was supposed to be 12 years old, but in fact Heath was already 20 at the time. She also played, in that same year's BBC miniseries production of Jane Eyre (1973), the character of Helen Burns, the fourteen-year-old boarding-school girl who is cruelly birched by Miss Scatcherd and who befriends the ten-year-old Jane when Jane is a newcomer to Lowood Institute. Other TV appearances included a role in the BBC's Play Of The Month: The Linden Tree by J.B. Priestley in 1974; Churchill's People in 1975; Muriel Spark's The Girls Of Slender Means; and The Sweeney in 1976. Her first TV presenting role was on BBC One's The Sunday Gang which ran from August 1976 on Sunday mornings, a role that continued for two years, where she met her future husband, Dave Cooke, who worked as musical director on the show. Heath continued to act during this period, appearing in BBC Two's Maiden's Trip in 1977. On 5 April 1979, she joined the children's series, Blue Peter, and left on 23 June 1980 to have her baby, Jemma Victoria Cooke. She was the first incumbent Blue Peter presenter to become pregnant. During her 14-month stint, she had an ultrasound scan live on television and climbed to the top of Westminster Abbey, while heavily pregnant.

In 1981, she returned to Blue Peter, to model corsets alongside her successor, Sarah Greene. In 2001, she appeared in the special Blue Peter pantomime Rock n' Roll Christmas, where she played the role of 'Miss Dripping'.