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Christopher Trace
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Christopher Leonard Trace (21 March 1933 – 5 September 1992) was an English actor and television presenter, most famous for his nine year stint as a presenter on the BBC1 children's programme Blue Peter.
r a period as a farm labourer, he joined the British Army then had a relatively undistinguished acting career – his greatest screen role being Charlton Heston's body double in Ben-Hur. But he then found fame as the very first presenter of Blue Peter on 16 October 1958, and stayed with the programme until 24 July 1967.
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Encyclopedia
Christopher Leonard Trace (21 March 1933 – 5 September 1992) was an English actor and television presenter, most famous for his nine year stint as a presenter on the BBC1 children's programme Blue Peter.
Career
After a period as a farm labourer, he joined the British Army then had a relatively undistinguished acting career – his greatest screen role being Charlton Heston's body double in Ben-Hur. But he then found fame as the very first presenter of Blue Peter on 16 October 1958, and stayed with the programme until 24 July 1967. According to the BBC, he got the job as presenter because he bonded with producer John Hunter Blair over their shared love of toy train sets.
Trace was forced to resign from the children's TV show by a then strait-laced BBC when his wife divorced him for having an affair with a 19-year-old hotel receptionist during a Blue Peter 'culture-embracing' summer expedition to Norway.
He became a writer and Production Manager for a film company named Spectator which failed, losing him a considerable amount of money. He was declared bankrupt in 1973, then returned to the BBC, first on local television in East Anglia and then on the acclaimed network TV programme Nationwide. He later had a breakfast slot on BBC Radio Norfolk.
By the mid-1970s, he had retired from the media, to become general manager of an engineering factory where he lost two toes in an accident but, on Blue Peter’s 20th anniversary in 1978 he appeared on the show and the factory shut for the day so that the workforce could watch his appearance. On the show, without warning anyone in advance, he announced that he wanted to give an Outstanding Endeavour Award. The award became an annual Blue Peter event. In the 1980s he worked in the press office of the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (SSAFA). In the 1990s, he briefly returned to the BBC to guest on and later host the nostalgia series Are You Sitting Comfortably? on Radio 2.
Quotations
During his time on Blue Peter, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography credits him with coining two quotations now prominent in British popular culture: the line "And now for something completely different" – later taken up by, and usually attributed to, Monty Python – was used as a segue to different parts of the programme; and "Here's one I made earlier" was used during the construction of models on the show, and has since been adopted by nearly all subsequent presenters on Blue Peter.
Sources
- Alistair McGown, "Trace, Christopher Leonard (1933–1992)", Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, Oct 2005; online edn, May 2006
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