Magpie was a British children’s television programme shown on ITV from 30 July 1968 to 6 June 1980. It was a magazine format show, intended to compete with the BBC‘s Blue Peter, but it attempted to be more “hip”, focusing more on popular culture. The show’s creators, Lewis Rudd and Sue Turner, named the programme Magpie, as a reference to the magpie‘s habit of collecting small items and also because of “mag” being evocative of “magazine” and “pie” being evocative of a collection of ingredients.