Old Announcers

After another dire weekend of awful ITV1 continuity was just wondering where all the announcers of yesteryear ended up ?

Found Trish Bertram as one of the new announcers on the Electric Sofa channels - she's linking the programmes on their website, Bid Up and QVC, the voice of Film GB it would seem, Mark Lipscombe seems to have vanished, as does Graham Bannerman,

Would love to see Colin Weston return to the airwaves, he was fab

He was on radio on a station called North Manchester FM, but looking at their website he seems to have parted company from NMFM.

If I were in charge of one of these new stations the Tories are talking about, one of the first things I'd be trying to do is round up all the good old-school annos and try to get them to appear in-vis on the station.

Cult following in the making -- can make all the difference to a small company.

Well, yes that's a lovely idea but it will never happen for two reasons.

Firstly, ITV had an agreement with Equity on the pay rates for ITV announcers. I was the national negotiator, and in a world where ITV was the only commercial game in town (and as famously described - albeit tongue in cheek - as 'a licence to print money'), pay rates were pretty good.

The proposed local stations will have tiny budgets and if they were to employ announcers at all they would probably be voicetracked in one monthly v/o session.

Secondly, many of the former ITV in-vision announcers are now very much older and (in my case at least) less telegenic than we once were. Indeed many are sadly no longer with us, and the majority of those who are are past retirement age.

There are of course a few notable exceptions, the lovely Trish being one of them. You can listen to her dulcet tones on www.radiosix.com every Sunday afternoon!

Well they don't need to be live -- not ideal but pre-recorded would be better than nothing. And not all of them are all that old -- I can think of a few that were still quite young back in the mid-1990s and they won't be that old now! I do take on board what you're saying though -- I think the point is that any small station needs a USP and something like this, at least in the early days could be just the hook a local station needs -- well-delivered and amusing barbs at the cheap tat that'll inevitably be on offer. It surely can't be breaking UTV's back to be still doing it.

A certain ex-TTTV announcer told me last year that he'd like to do it again some time, so the desire to give it a go may well still be around.

Would've thought it would've been easier with 'new' ITV than 'old' ITV, as you wouldn't have to worry whether 15 different announcers were running to time or not, only one?

By the way, is it possible that ITV 1 could goto national playout of adverts like the rest of ITV, as I can't see any regional specific differences thesedays?

(I work for a grocery wholesaler who is affilliated to a international conveineince store chain & in the 'old days' certain major companies, let's say for example Nestle Rowntree, used to part launch a product in a specific ITV area, to 'test' it out. (This meant as our company covers several ITV regions (Northern half of HTV, all of Central & Anglia, southern bits of Yorkshire, Granada & northern bit of London, we had to be careful which retailers got the product, else we got penalised! This hasn't happened for years by the way!)

Where has Mark Lipscombe been before? Anything memorable? I can distinctly remember the name, but I have no idea why.

Trish Bertram was the stadium announcer for the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, back in 2006. That was the last I had heard of her.

does anybody know what happened to some of the old Anglia TV announcers?

katie glass (the 'voice' of anglia in the 1990s along with graham bell who died some years ago), and there was graham rogers who was a regular voice into the night - where did they go?

Thames and Carlton London. Read the news for Central South/Thames Valley Tonight.


Although he would have been heard on Anglia thanks to working for Meridian when the continuity came from there, he's got a show on BBC Wiltshire thesedays.

Thames Valley Tonight is where I remember him from. I believe he presented the last bulletin before Thames Valley turned into Meridian.

No chance, just in the same way that I doubt Channel 4 and 5 won't ever lose their ability to sell adverts to particular parts of the country.

There are still regional adverts these days of course but they're probably just less obvious. There are fewer small companies advertising just to 1 region these days but that's probably because there aren't the regionally based sales teams going out and getting them and the ad slots have been moved to the more expensive parts of the schedule