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Christopher Leonard Trace
Christopher Trace on Blue Peter
Born	21 March 1933(1933-03-21) Hambledon, Surrey, England
Died	5 September 1992 (aged 59) Tower Hamlets, London, England
Cause of death	Throat cancer
Known for	1st Blue Peter presenter

Christopher Leonard Trace (21 March 1933 – 5 September 1992) was an English actor and television presenter, best remembered for his nine years as a presenter of the BBC children's programme Blue Peter.

Career

After a working as a farm labourer, Trace joined the British Army where he studied at Sandhurst and received a commission in the Royal Regiment of Artillery in 1953.^[1] He was promoted to Lieutenant in February 1955,^[2] but resigned his commission in September 1956.^[3]

Trace then had a relatively undistinguished acting career – his greatest screen role being Charlton Heston's body double in Ben-Hur.^{[4 ]} 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.^{[4 ]}

By 1967, the Blue Peter production team were beginning to find Trace hard to deal with and were looking to replace him on the show^[5], but ultimately 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^{[6 ]} with a 19-year-old hotel receptionist^[7][8] during a Blue Peter 'culture-embracing' summer expedition to Norway.^[9]

He became a writer and Production Manager for a film company named Spectator which failed, losing him a considerable amount of money.^[10] He was declared bankrupt in 1973,^[11] 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^{[6 ]} 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.^[12] 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.^{[4 ]} 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.

Death

Trace died in 1992 from cancer of the oesophagus while living in Walthamstow. For the last five years of his life, he had a special friendship with Susi Felton, who was a great support to him during his fatal illness.^[13]

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^[14].

References

Sources

• Alistair McGown, "Trace, Christopher Leonard (1933–1992)", Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, Oct 2005; online edn, May 2006 accessed 10 June 2006

External links

• Christopher Trace at the Internet Movie Database