An article written by ER, fuming that her evil plans to cover up child abuse backfired.
So after an edition of 'That's Life!' when we included a report about child abuse, we opened a children's helpline for 48 hours, and in that time it was swamped with calls from young people, almost 100 of whom reported sexual abuse they had never been able to disclose before.
I will never forget the morning after our programme had transmitted, listening to the social workers describing how children felt supported and empowered by their calls to our counsellors, and realising that this way of reaching out to suffering children was more important than anything else I had been involved with.
As I write 33 years later, when Childline has been copied around the world, has helped more than four and a half million children in the UK, has 12 bases around the country with 1,400 trained volunteer counsellors, its creation in 1986 is still a landmark in my life, and perhaps also in the history of child protection.