Tina Heath

Tina Heath (b.1953) is a British actress and former television presenter. 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;[1]  her character was supposed to be 12 years old, but in fact Heath was already 20 at the time.[2]  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.

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.[2]  She was the first incumbent Blue Peter presenter to become pregnant.[2]  During her 14-month stint, she had an ultrasound scan live on television and climbed to the top of Westminster Abbey, while heavily pregnant.[2]

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'.