We've started work on the first of our oral history CD series due for release in 2010 Remember When – Recollections of Times Past. We hope that the series will interest anyone in spoken history.

Each CD will take a broad theme, such as working in the 1960s, the British seaside holiday, post-war eating habits, my first car, the package tour.

We will be speaking with ordinary people about their everyday experiences, and their not-so-ordinary lives, as a way of conveying the feeling of these eras and themes.

However, we start the series with a special...

The Announcer

From the outset of Independent Television (ITV) in Britain in 1956, sixteen regional commercial TV stations employed men and women to be the 'friendly face of the region'.

Their role was a slightly bizarre one, as they were employed to sit all day 'linking' tv programmes with announcements, effectively smoothing over cracks and mistakes caused by technical breakdowns, and programmes that ended early or late.

Many made careers out of this niche area of broadcasting, many more remember their faces and voices. But where did they go, and what was life as an announcer really like?

In The Announcer, we hear from ITV announcers Verity Martindill, Trish Bertram, Christopher Robbie, Judy Matheson, Peter Marshall, Philip Ellesmore, Colin Weston, David Hamilton, and Judi Spiers about their careers during the days of a rather less frenetic ITV network.