Profile of Jean Metcalfe on Famous Like Me

Jean Metcalfe was an English radio broadcaster.

She was born on 2 March 1923 in Reigate, Surrey, the eldest child of Guy Vivian Metcalfe, a railway clerk, and Gwendoline Annie, née Reed. Hers was a typical lower middle-class family of the time, without a bathroom, and they used Southern Railway privilege tickets to get them to their most ambitious holiday destination, Cornwall.

At school she excelled at elocution and art, and at home formed a passionate love of the radio. She joined the Children's Hour radio circle and entered for competitions which entitled the winners to visit Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC. She also excelled at school dramatics, and once played Queen Victoria.

After leaving school in 1939, she went to secretarial college then, in 1940 she applied for a job at the BBC. By bending the truth on her CV, she succeeded in getting a job with the variety department at £2 5s. 6d. a week. Her first broadcast (a poem, for the Empire Service) was on 21 May 1941.

She was auditioned as an announcer for the new General Forces programme, a joint BBC–War Office venture which was the BBC's first worldwide service and the first to use women announcers. She then began her period of service with the programme that made her famous: Forces Favourites, a request programme in which members of the armed forces abroad, and their families at home, could ask the ‘compère’, as presenters were called, to play their favourite music. She began the job after five hours of studying the programme under its editor, Margaret Hubble. It was while doing the programme from London that she ‘met’ her male colleague at the Hamburg end of the operation, Squadron Leader Arthur Clifford (Cliff) Michelmore. They married on 4 March 1950 (after the programme had been converted to the peacetime Two-Way Family Favourites) and had two children.

In the same year she started to present Woman's Hour on BBC radio, a programme which at that time had a long list of forbidden topics. Self-effacing and gently spoken, she pioneered the art of interviewing stars in their own homes, including the wartime ‘forces' sweetheart’ singer Vera Lynn, the irascible television personality Gilbert Harding, the song and dance man Frankie Vaughan, and the stiff-upper-lipped film actor Kenneth More. In 1955 the Daily Mail made her broadcasting personality of the year and in 1963 she won a Variety Club of Great Britain radio personality award.

In 1964 she gave up broadcasting to raise her family and did not return full-time until 1971, when she presented If You Think You've Got Problems, a programme in which a broad range of human problems were discussed, many of which would not have been allowed when she began her association with Woman's Hour. Though the BBC objected to one of her programmes, on lesbianism, because it would be going out on a Sunday.

On television, she made her début with Robert Beatty in Saturday Night Out and did guest spots for Juke Box Jury and Wednesday Magazine. In 1986 she published a joint autobiography with her husband, Two-Way Story. She died at Petersfield, Hampshire, on 28 January 2000.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Jean Metcalfe